PPC search engines are ok: what about their partners?

There are literally hundreds of pay per click search engines in operation now; but very few of them will actually deliver you traffic, regardless of their promises. This is a market that has been cornered by a handful of companies and, of course, they are very different one another.

Ppc companies gain their coverage by offering webmasters search boxes/feeds under a revenue share arrangement, i.e where the webmaster will be paid for each search carried out via their site, or for each click a search generates. The best pay per click engines have thousands of affiliate sites in their networks. But it could be a problem for your business.

Ppc search engines don’t accept every web site into their network: of course, they lay down restrictive conditions you must satisfy in order to be accepted. But very often their search partners don’t bring you a good quality traffic. For example, some month ago I have set up a Ppc campaign for one of my customers, I have tracked the results with a professional software and I have noticed that the traffic provided by each search engine was very different one another: in fact the conversion rate could vary from 1.5 sales per 100 visitors to 0.4 sales per 100 visitors depending on the search engines. In particular I have observed that one of this search engines was delivering a lot of traffic (17% of the total) from Poland and Ukraine: I have nothing against polish people, but if my business is targeted to US customers I cannot accept to spend 17% of my budget to reach people I cannot sell my product.

So, to cut a long story short, you must consider Ppc search engines, because they can be very profitable, but always and always track your results in order to maximize your return on investment.