Profiting From Smaller Search Engines February 23, 2005 Once you venture into
world of Pay Per Click advertising, you'll soon discover that marketplace is sharply divided between tier 1 Search Engines (Google and Overture), and everyone else. While it's difficult to imagine a comprehensive, successful Pay Per Click Advertising campaign that doesn't include major players, companies that limit themselves to Google and Overture may be missing out on profitable traffic.
Defining Tier 1 And Tier 2 Search Engines:
Two things separate Google and Overture from rest of Pay Per Click Search Engines. The big players deliver more traffic, and quality of clicks is often better. Simply put, if you advertise on Google and Overture your ad will be seen by more people, and these people are more likely going to buy from you. This is why its difficult to ignore big players when crafting your Pay Per Click Advertising strategy. However, if you're willing to put in effort, you'll often discover it's smaller, lesser known, Search Engines that ultimately deliver most profitable traffic to your site.
The Downside Of Being Big:
Ironically, same factors that make Google and Overture essential to any Pay Per Click Advertising campaign are also reasons it's becoming increasingly difficult for small and medium size companies to generate profitable traffic from top tier Search Engines.
Nearly every company doing Pay Per Click Advertising is using Google and Overture, meaning you're competing against virtually every company remotely connected with your industry for your keywords. As competition for your keywords increases your prices rise, and your profits fall. Both Google and Overture have hundreds of thousands of advertisers, causing keywords in some competitive industries to sell for over $10.00 per click! As this trend continues small and medium size companies will be forced to explore alternative sources of traffic if they hope to maintain their profit margins on their Pay Per Click Advertising campaigns.
The other downside of working with big Search Engines is they tend to focus their customer support resources on their big customers. This can make it difficult for smaller companies to get help optimizing their campaigns, generating lists of keywords or creating compelling ad copy.
Thankfully, there are several smaller Search Engines who can fill void by delivering high quality Search traffic at an affordable price.
The Best Of The Rest:
Once you expand your horizons beyond Google and Overture, and begin running tests on some smaller Search Engines, you'll find wide discrepancies in traffic quality and volume, software functionality and customer support. When deciding which smaller Search Engines to work with we recommend focusing on traffic quality as key criteria. If your clicks convert into customers, it's easier to put up with challenges that come with working with smaller Search Engines.
