What Are the Pay Per Click Alternatives
to AdWords?

There's More to PPC Than Google Adwords Alone.
 
Paul Smithson - 2nd March 2009
   
Many people are moving away from AdWords due to a number of factors.  The Google Slap has certainly caused many people to flee due to massive increases in their cost-per-click. Some advertisers have found it to be too much work to increase their quality score enough to qualify for cheaper clicks. 

Another major reason for seeking an alternative to AdWords is the amount of competition for each keyword. When the number of competitors increases so much that your CPC rises to such an extent that you can no longer make a profit, it may be time to seek other options.

One of the best alternatives to AdWords is Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly known as Overture. It’s an established and trustworthy network, and the quality of the traffic is seen as being pretty good. Yahoo doesn’t have as much traffic as Google, but the clicks are usually much cheaper, which means you might get fewer click-throughs, but you’ll make more profit on each one than you might do with Google. 

Another reliable network is the MSN AdCenter.  MSN is also seen as having relatively high quality traffic, and their prices are also generally much cheaper than AdWords.  Again, the volume isn’t there, but the prices usually make it worth using.

There are also a number of smaller networks providing an alternative to AdWords, but most of them tend to have very low volumes of traffic and quality of the traffic that they do have can be seriously questionable.  Some of these networks offer clicks for as low as a penny, but their traffic is often so low and quality so dubious that you still can’t make a profit even at such a low cost per click.

GoClick is one major alternative that is known for having very poor quality traffic. They can provide a very large number of clicks at a very low price. Although they may have very inexpensive clicks, the traffic has been known to generate no sales in thousands and thousands of clicks. 

This may be because of the poor quality of the sites in their network, or because they have poor tracking in place to help discover and prevent fraudulent clicks, or due to a number of other reasons, but many people have stated openly that this network produces horrible conversion rates, and the cheap clicks simply do not make up for their poor conversions.

LookSmart is a fairly well-known search marketing company.  They provide relatively inexpensive clicks, but they don’t have a lot of volume.  They don’t have extremely productive traffic, in general, but their traffic is known for being much better quality than the traffic from GoClick.

7Search is a popular alternative.  Their clicks are fairly cheap, and they have decent volume.  The quality of the traffic is said to be pretty good, so it may be worth taking a look at.

Finally, Bidvertiser is a popular search marketing program.  Their clicks are pretty inexpensive, and they provide a pretty decent volume, but again the problem seems to be that the traffic just doesn’t convert to sales.

The important thing is to do your own testing as what might not work for some people might work well for you in your particular niche. It’s always worth testing things, because until you do you have nothing but assumptions to go on. Set aside a few dollars and give it a whirl. Who knows, you might stumble across a winner. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars or even hundreds of dollars to get an idea as to whether one of the alternative PPC providers is working. Simply monitor the traffic that’s coming in and see how well it is converting.

If you’ve had a 1000 visitors, but made only one sale from that traffic you might decide it’s not worth doing, particularly if you’re selling a low priced product. However, if you’re selling something for $200 with a $100 profit on each sale a conversion rate of 1 in 1000 might be fine, particularly if you were only paying one cent per click. That would mean you’d be spending $10 for each order, and at that kind of conversion rate and cost it would be a complete no-brainer, wouldn’t it?

About Paul Smithson - Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software development, and maximizing the potential of on-line businesses.

Source: http://www.xsitepro.com/what-are-the-pay-per-click-alternatives-to-adwords.html

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