Smaller Search Engines - Are They Worth It ?

I buy clicks on five search engines at this point. The smaller search engines don't get me near as much traffic, but then again the cost per click is lower than Overture in most cases.

Do these smaller players generate enough traffic to be worthwhile ?

In my case the answer is a qualified YES.

The smaller SEs may not get a heck of a lot of traffic by people going thru the SE's own home page for searches; however, they are all actively recruiting and building partnership networks of their own in which large sites will use their search engines to return results. If you go to their home pages, they usually display names of their partners so you can see who uses them, and many are sites you would recognize and welcome their traffic if you could get it.

Bid position matters more when bidding on the smaller SEs

In some cases the large sites who use the smaller SEs for searches will skim the top three results from several SE networks and present those to their users (similar to how Jeeves does).

So, if you are not among the top three listings for your keyword, your ads will not appear on many of the SE network sites who only skim the top few results, and you will drastically reduce the potential exposure of your message.

If you are among the top three listings in several smaller search engines, you might have several entries on a site's collected results page that pulls together the best of several SEs. Showing up more than once on the page is good, and better yet you only have to pay for the ones that get clicked. Since no one besides Google bases your cost per click on clickthru rates, it doesn't hurt you to "compete" against yourself with these smaller players.

How much traffic can you expect from the smaller SEs ?

Here's a distribution of the clicks I get on a typical day from various SEs:

Engine    pct   min bid
--------  ---   --------
Google    66%   USD 0.05
Overture  17%   USD 0.10
Kanoodle   7%   USD 0.05
Findwhat   7%   USD 0.05
7search    3%   USD 0.01

You can see from the table above that in my case I saw a significant increase in traffic (about 50% overall increase) when I added the other search engines. Overall Google is my best source of PPC traffic, boasting both the highest volume of traffic and the best cost per click. After Google, Overture delivers the next most traffic but is the most expensive per click, both in terms of minimum bids as well as effective bid rates to compete for good a position (but I still welcome the sales that come from those clicks). After Overture comes the smaller search engines, and while they deliver significantly less traffic than the big guys, it's a lot more than zero and the cost per click is attractive.

Always Start with Google

Overture was the original leader in PPC technology, and I've met some people who use Overture exclusively. If you are working exclusively in Overture up to now, I have to tell you that in my experience Google is the place to experiment with new ideas.

I always work out new campaigns in Google for reasons I will mention a little later. Once I know what works well on Google then I propagate my proven campaigns to Overture because of the volume of traffic it can deliver. And then to make the most of my good campaigns, I propagate them to the smaller search engines.

The reason I do it this way is because Google has the most responsive system bar none:

your ads go online immediately,
feedback is outstanding and near-real-time,
campaign management is the most flexible allowing you to isolate your experiments from your baseline ads
if you do post an ad that violates Google policy, they will catch up with you and take the offending ad offline; but they will often explain why and even suggest a change that would make your ad acceptable; and again your changes go back online immediately (some others merely point you to a stock blurb and if it's not obvious you scratch your head, resubmit, wait for days, you get the idea)

The others (except 7search who isn't big enough to matter in this regard) impose a manual review of all new ads plus any changes to existing ad content or links, which means slow turnarounds of 2 to 5 days for each iteration you want to test.

Meanwhile using Google I can easily get through an iteration per day (or quicker) when I want to try out something new. This saves a lot of time and consequently saves & makes money by helping me to zero in quicker on ads that draw clicks. Then once an ad is stabilized on Google and has passed the Google quality checks, I can usually get them online with the other SEs on the first attempt.

So the bottom line message is you should definitely take advantage of the significant additional traffic you can glean from the other search engines. To make the most of the time you invest in all other search engine campaigns, use Google as your sandbox. It will reduce the number of iterations it will take to launch ad campaigns on the other search engines, and that can literally save weeks of time in getting new campaigns up and profitable.

-- Ed Yodis
edyodis@erubicon.com

Resources:

GoogleCash - this is the book that got me going and got me profitable with Google AdWords. A very thorough and practical tutorial book about Google AdWords, with crystal clear examples that are easy to appreciate, follow, and apply to create your own campaigns. Once I got a few basic campaigns started, one of the bonuses, an mp3 recording of an audio teleseminar by Perry Marshall and Jonathan Mizel, showed me numerous ways to optimize my campaigns that saved me 50% on ads and doubled my sales in less than two weeks. It was like AdWords on steroids, producing immediate and sustained profits that have paid for the book over and over and over again.

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