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New Pay Engines: Are They Worth It?Home > Promote > Advertising > Search Engines The first pay for click search engine, Goto.com, has proven to be an invaluable resource for webmasters and websurfers alike. Goto has done just about everything right — terrific customer service, very successful advertising campaigns and affiliate program, and somehow they have driven 3% of all search engine traffic to their site. This is an amazing number considering every result is paid for. Goto is probably the least expensive way to pay for targeted users. It's a service no webmaster can afford not to utilize. There is no web advertising out there that compares to Goto when it comes to cost and target. Getting a targeted visitor for a few pennies is a bargain. I recommend reading Michael Wong's article on using Goto to get a good listing in Dogpile. As all startup companies and venture capitalists know, if one can be successful at something so can about a dozen others. Kanoodle and FindWhat certainly hope so. Several companies have launched Goto-like engines over the past few months, the most notable being Kanoodle and Findwhat. Can either of these achieve a fraction of Goto's success? Are these engines capable of bringing traffic to one's site? So how do they work? In order to add a URL one must bid on a search term. For example, the term 'web design' fits this site so we must decide how much that term is worth to us. When a search query is made, the sites with the highest bids appear first in the results. If two sites have equal bids, the site that has been registered longer is listed first. For results without bids both engines pull from Inktomi's (Hotbot, Yahoo) database. All three engines require a $25 deposit before one can place bids. In this article we will be reviewing the newbies, Kanoodle and FindWhat in great detail. We will judge both by: Application - How easy is it to add and maintain search terms? How can one check their rankings compared to others? How easy is the interface in general? Customer Service - Are the companies responsive? Are they willing to go the extra mile to help webmasters with their accounts? Tools - What tools are available to assist webmasters when choosing their bids? Reports - How detailed are the reports? Competition - How many other webmasters have bids active? Traffic - The most important. How much traffic do the engines receive? How many users can one expect to receive? It is unfair to compare the two to Goto.com, but in this case we have no choice. Goto has set the pay-per-keyword standard. After we look at Kanoodle and Findwhat, we'll compare them to Goto and each other. You might be surprised by some of the results. We used many search terms on all the engines but we'll be using 'web design' for examples since it is the most popular of terms we used. Before you read further, I recommend you test your search terms on all engines using the boxes in the sidebar. New Pay Engines: Are They Worth It? |
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