| LED Digest 1808: Are Smaller PPC Providers Worth It? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ May 24, 2004 Issue #1808 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== Third Tier PPC Providers - Worth It? ==-- ~ Abu Haider "...there are a number of smaller providers out there, [is it] worth spending money on them?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== To PayPal or not to PayPal ==-- ~ Dan Thies "The main benefit of using Paypal is convenience to our customers." ~ Muhammad Shabeer Ali "It's a fact that PayPal is trusted." ~ Sandy Galvin "The big problem for us was the frequency with which customers bogged down on PayPal..." --== Credible SEOs and SEMs ==-- ~ Chris Nielsen "...there are companies that will work on a commission basis..." ~ Peter Warnock "Third party advocates like the Better Business Bureau and TRUSTe are a good starting point..." --== The Demise of Email? ==-- ~ Ian Dickson "Yahoo Groups is a free service and you get what you pay for." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Outbound Links Increasing Rankings ==-- ~ Dave Roberts ====== NEW ====================================== From: Abu Haider Subject: Third Tier PPC Providers - Worth it? Hi Everyone, While the Pay Per Click advertisement market is dominated by Google and Overture, there are a number of smaller providers out there and I was wondering if it is worth spending money on them. I have some experience with Enhance Interactive (formerly ah-ha.com) which I would like to share. I was contacted by a sales rep of ah-ha.com by the end of last year. At that time it was being taken over by Enhance Interactive. I was told its a network of more than three hundred third tier search engines and they serve over 3 million queries every day. The minimum bid was just $0.01 per click and there is no monthly minimum. Because I take care of search engine optimization and promotion of several websites, I thought I should give it a try. It has been several months and I think the results are worthy of a discussion. The website I used is a small software component company. About 140 Keywords are assigned to the site and many of them are too generic and remotely relate to the content of the site. These keywords were selected and assigned by the PPC provider. A total of 185 clicks have been generated in the past few months. Many of them through those generic keywords that don't really relate to the site and therefore I think didn't really generate any result. The minimum bid price has been increased to $0.03 ever since Enhance took over and this site is on position 1 for all the keywords at the minimum bid price. Which means there is no one bidding for any of those keywords. I started with a $50 initial deposit and after all these months I still have $33.00 in the account. Last time I logged into the account, I thought I will try their search engine's performace and see how the results appear. To start with, I just clicked the search button without any search phrase or keyword. The search engine should have said I should enter a search phrase, instead, it returned a bunch of '404 Page not found', '302 Page permanently removed' and other error pages as the search result. But on top there was ebay. Looks like ebay is the only one wasting their money there. And of course, myself. From what I understood, these small providers tie up with each other to provide advertise and search results to their affiliate websites (small search engines). It would be interesting to know how are the other smaller PPC providers doing. Abu Haider ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Dan Thies Subject: PayPal or CC > A question we are often asked is "Should I use PayPal or > credit cards?" ... PayPal or Credit Card. What experiences > do you have moving from one to the other, or taking both? - John Smart, LED 1807 We use Paypal for all payments on our site. The main benefit of using Paypal is convenience to our customers. Most of our clients are site designers or SEO/SEM consultants, and they order reports frequently - usually every time they bring in a new client. If they have a Paypal account, Paypal allows them to quickly place an order, without fishing out a credit card, etc. As it turns out, nearly all of our repeat customers do have Paypal accounts. While we "could" offer to store credit card information in a customer profile and use any service we liked to process the transactions, that would greatly increase the security requirements for our site. We would face increased risk because of the possibility of a hacker gaining access to this information. No thanks! Just to be clear, when you use Paypal, it's not "either Paypal or credit cards." Paypal allows customers to pay without opening an account, which is a fairly recent change. Although the fees are slightly higher than a traditional merchant account, we're able to offer credit cards and online checks through a single payment processor. The result is faster service for our repeat customers, and a lot fewer administrative headaches for us. Dan Thies SEO Research Labs http://www.seoresearchlabs.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Muhammad Shabeer Ali Subject: PayPal for Sure! I have been recently working on a project to integrate PayPal into a site. When the client gave me the project, he too had this dilemna on whether to opt for PayPal or not. Since he was targetting the international markets too, he was concerned that many of his customers wouldn't have a PayPal account. On doing some research I learned of a new feature of PayPal that completely allayed my clients fear. Your customers do not need to have a PayPal account anymore to pay you! This is what PayPal says: ---------------------- "PayPal just made it easier for your buyers to pay you: They no longer need to create a PayPal account to complete their transactions." ---------------------- Please visit this PayPal page to learn more: http://snipurl.com/6kim [paypal.com] I think all of you should now reconsider whether to go back to using PayPal. Why? It's a fact that PayPal is *trusted*. I personally wouldn't use a credit card everywhere, but would surely be confident about paying through PayPal. The best part about PayPal is that it accepts all major credit cards, there are no setup fees and there already exists 40 million PayPal accounts (you can use that trust). Muhammad Shabeer Ali White Mark Media Design ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Sandy Galvin Subject: PayPal For a number of years on our web site we used PayPal, but eventually slipped away to using a conventional secure credit card transaction. The big problem for us was the frequency with which customers bogged down on PayPal in answering questions (and then abandoned the transaction). We knew this from the astonishing frequency at which customers called us on the toll-free line to order by telephone and complained bitterly about the experience. I am sure that PayPal has changed some things to make it easier to use, but in my mind, they generally failed to look at the customer's experience empirically. It doesn't matter how smooth the flow and sequence of inquiry may seem to an expert computer user, if the naive user gets confused, or bored, or irritated, or suspicious... sales go south. At the same time, the synergy between PayPal and Ebay means that there are a lot of customers familiar with PayPal and willing to use it. If a web site can use both conventional processing and PayPal as well, this might provide an additional increment of sales. I like PayPal, and never had a problem with them. But I would not use them again as a sole method of receiving payments online. Sandy Galvin Barclay Blocks http://www.barclaywoods.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Credible SEOs > ... will [the SEO] sign a contract whose only payment > will be a percentage of your increased profits? - Bill Davison, LED 1807 Actually, there are companies that will work on a commission basis and do quite well, but what you propose is generally not realistic, and here is why: 1) SEO services, if done correctly, increase the traffic to a web site and the traffic is much more qualified, or consisting of people that have had a search phrase match your site listing, so they see it. If the listing is well-written and accurately describes the site, and the person is interested, then they will click and visit your site. Thus ends the responsibility of the SEO. Most clients ask us to work on an existing site and we have little or no control over the site we optimize beyond what the client allows us. If there are problems with the site, we can only make our recommendations. This is crucial for us, since if the site does not perform, it will reflect badly on us, even though it is not our fault. If a site sees an increase in traffic, but not an increase in conversions, either the traffic being sent to the site is not qualified, or the site sucks. Properly aligning the finger of blame can be difficult, but should not be. Checking the web server logs for referrers and keyword phrases that were used to find the site is our confirmation that we have done as specified we would do for the project. However, this should not be the end of the CONCERN of a professional SEO provider. One aspects of site analysis for a SEO should be the usability, functionality, and sales potential of a potential client's site. 2) How do you properly establish a proper percentage? $0.50 per sale? $50 per sale? Then for how long? 6 months? 5 years? These type of arrangements are not that uncommon, but from my perspective you often have an agreement where both parties do not get a balanced return. Either the company owner has problems and the SEO gets few payments or the project is a success and the SEO is pay many, many times what they would have gotten with a standard contract. 3) If the SEO services are done by a professional it is not realistic to expect them to not only delay some unknown period of time to be paid for their services. Besides, what you are really talking about is a type of partnership. There's nothing wrong with that, but before I invest in your business I want to be treated like a partner and have a say in how that business is run, and have some assurance that you won't decided to shut the doors and leave me with little or nothing for my trouble. Would I ever consider such an arrangement? Sure, but only with a client that was reasonable and that I felt had the business skills, flexibility, and offering that had good, solid potential. Thank you, Chris Nielsen www.consultant-directory.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Peter Warnock Subject: Credible SEOs > Where can I find an industry standard or required > credentials that I can use to validate a potential SEO? - Clint Whitsett, LED 1804 To my knowledge credible industry associations do not exist yet as the industry is far from mature. Third party advocates like the Better Business Bureau and TRUSTe are a good starting point in determining the credibility of a business. While they aren't necessarily shields, they can step in and help arbitrate when members violates their policies. Peter Warnock ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Ian Dickson Subject: Email demise > I've tried in vain to contact anyone at Yahoo Groups. > I've never received a single response... It seems like > Yahoo Groups is on autopilot. - Michael Coley, LED 1806 Yahoo Groups is a free service and you get what you pay for. They are also subject to being blocked by anti-spam (I find that one of my addresses keeps getting blocked from time to time and I have to reset. My ISP can't see why their antispam is blocking the desired mail. My view is that sheer volume generates flags in some systems) On the subject of email demise - our problem is handling all the bounces, autoresponders and "I can't RTFM" responses that go with all email based systems, so as well as having much sympathy for Yahoo staff, we are looking at Off Line Readers, (which works in our model because everyone is willing participant, clearly it doesn't help with basic outreach for marketers). If anyone has any praise / otherwise re any specific OLRs, I'd be interested in feedback. Cheers Ian Dickson http://www.commkit.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Dave Roberts Subject: Outbound links do increase ranking After doing linking campaigns for a couple of clients, I noticed that pagerank seemed to increase as soon as I put outbound links on the site, long before any number of links could be reciprocated. I noticed this with several linking campaigns. This is contrary to how Google's descriptions, and all of the "expert" opinion that you read, says that it works. But I saw it. I reported this in several forums, and was heartily poo-pooed by the experts lurking there. It just didn't work that way! But I'm an engineer, and I'm trained to look at the data in front of me and value it more than a prejudged opinion that's not based on data. Finally I joined a form where I pay and can get experiments run, and guess what I requested? You got it, a study of search engine ranking vs. number of outbound links. The correlation for Google was startlingly high! What this means is that what I saw happening in front of me does indeed happen. Outbound links to help search engine results. I've also seen that reciprocal links are better than outbound links. But this new result tells us that when we do a link campaign, now we don't have to be so quick to remove those links that are not reciprocated--they're helping too! And we can be confident of a boost in results as soon as we put a few hundred links onto a site. Dave Roberts http://www.davedoesitall.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Avarice, envy, pride, Three fatal sparks, have set the hearts of all On Fire." - Dante |
