Have you tried any PPC search engines for marketing purposes? If yes, what are those engines and did you find them effective enough?

I have found that Pay-Per-Click advertising with search engines is a TOTAL waste of money.

I spent about $300 on PPC advertising with Google and Overture, and had a horrible outcome.


It's a sneaky form of competitive gambling. Unless you're one of the top 5 highest bidders (cost per click), you get no traffic. If you big high enough to be one of the top 5 bidders for any given term, you pay anywhere from $3 to $15 (for a measly CLICK!!). In the meantime, you have to compete and keep raising you bid price to outbid the competition.



Trust me, it's not worth your money.



John

Not true! I know many people who have had great success with SE PPC ads, and other who use banner PPC ads that work great. It all depends on where you spend your money.

Agree Multi-Cap.

You have to find a niche, especially in a competitive field like web hosting, otherwise PPC may not work for you.
If PPC was a waste of money, why are so many companies using PPC search engines? and continually using them at that?

Branding? New clients generated? Whole heap of reasons I suppose.
Personally have never used any PPC engines myself, as I prefer pure results.. but if I was, I would be aiming to find the right niche search terms and keyword phrases to target.

I have used 7search.com. Have had the best results from them.

Netxhost: Did you use them to advertise your hosting business? How much did you spend? Over what span of time? What kind of return did you see?

I spent between $15-$19 a day for 2 weeks. We had around 1000 hits. Return was about 5%.

5% is a pretty good return. Are any of these long term customers?

That's not bad at all

1000 hits for about $140 or so and about 50 converted to clients...good job!

I've had absolutely great success advertising my niche hosting company with just search enginge ppc ads that are highly targetted.

I've heard 7search is good + kanoodle is diabolical.
Overture and adwords have produced good results but are expensive (especially overture because it is not as targeted)

Again, when going the PPC route, you have to understand the real value of a customer. It's not like you have to get your money back instantly. If the average customer stays with you for a year and you have a good profit margin already, you'll most likely find out that paying a few dollars/click can still be profitable by the end of a year. Sure, niche keywords are great, but you could do both niche and broad.

7search is indeed one of the better (and more genuine) PPC/CPC engines.


Google obviously dominates - and we usually see nice 2-3% returns, followed by an approx 80-90 'keep' on those who came the google route (over 6 month's).


In my opinion, it does not pay to use some of the larger (directly hosting related) engines. We recently had a very disturbing instance with the biggest PPC (hosting related) engine - let's just say the clicks were more flooded than an ice-cream factory in the middle of the sahara desert.


We tend to test any/all method's of advertising (including this here board), and PPC is probably the best for instant ROI, whereas banner advertisements, are better for brand-building (in my opinion)


Simon

Old school banner exchanges will come back, something that you pay to have a bunch of small websites.

Smaller PPC like Findwhat.com will work better then bigger ones in the hosting industry which is pretty competitive.