PPC Engines I Won't Do Business With Anymore

Categories: Dating, Pen Pals, Friends: Scam Warnings, Relationships: Christian Finances
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Submitted by: Nannette | View Member Profile | View Other Posts
Created: 12/22/2004

I own and run this website, as well as several others. But this site is the one that I invest nearly all of my advertising dollars in. I have done advertising for several years, and I have had bad experiences with several sites.

I track my return on investment (ROI) very carefully. I use tracking URLS to see where the clicks are coming from, and in many cases, even track the keywords to make sure I am only bidding with optimized keywords for this website. If a keyword outperforms in clicks, with no one clicking to join, then I know it is a bad keyword... bringing in the wrong crowd, or simply a keyword that is being scammed by an affiliate that is fraudulently clicking that keyword's link to drive up clicks, but not traffic.

Speaking of which, here is a link to an article pointed out to me by Sam, owner of ChristianCafe.com:

India's Secret Army of Online Ad Clickers

Now, back to my poor experiences. For several years, I advertised on many PPC (pay per click) search engines. About a year ago, I realized I was majorly wasting my money on several, and stopped doing business with them.

The most wasteful in dollars vs. return on investment was ah-ha.com. Then a year later, I decided, maybe they had changed and were new and improved, after all, ah-ha.com changed their name to enhance.com, so maybe they fixed what seemed to have been broken.

What is true of all of these sites is that I limited my keywords very tightly, using only words related to Christian Singles, Christian Dating, etc., nothing like Christian romance, or Christian love. Just very specific and very few.

So I restarted my ads with ah-ha.com aka enhance.com, and invested $50. My $50 earned me 554 clicks, 6 of them clicking the JOIN FREE link, and 4 of them being valid members, and two getting their account deleted for inappropriate behavior. Of the 4, one made a payment for a $20 return on my investment.

As you may guess, the other 3 may make payment at some point, and the one who made payment may renew at some point, but initially the number of JOINers is extremely low. That is considered what I call a 139 click to join ratio. For every 139 clicks, one person joined free. Will I renew with them? No.

My experience with ah-ha.com in the past is that they used to require auto-credit card renewal. I couldn't keep track of how much was being spent. I ended up spending $985 with only a $260 return on investment before pulling the plug.

Next is Kanoodle.com. I spent $50 with them, and within 10 days, all my money was gone. I received 827 clicks for my $50 and NOT ONE person clicked the JOIN FREE link. Unheard of. I reported potential fraud and they claimed all my clicks were indeed valid. They did offer to give me $25 good faith and "they have suggested an optimization of your account by limiting your exposure to fewer of our partners."

My thought to them was that if I needed limited exposure to fewer of their partners, why would they have those partners that should be limited in the first place? I told them to keep my money and close the account.

One should not have to always police their account.

7search.com:

On Nov. 18th, I spent $25 to renew at 7search.com with well-tuned keywords. In the last month, I have received only 8 clicks, not one person has clicked the JOIN FREE link. But I still have $24.21 in my account. But it seems that account is going nowhere and I am not getting any traffic. So one seems nearly as bad as the other. My history with 7search.com in the past was that I spent $425 with them and only received a $10 return on investment. When my $24.21 runs out, I won't be renewing.

I spent $25 with xuppa.com on Nov. 18th, and as of Dec. 22 have had ONE click, no FREE JOINs.

I didn't advertise with searchfeed.com this time around because they put all of their bidded listings BELOW their affiliate listings such as looksmart and ah-ha, so if you're advertising elsewhere, you might as well not advertise at searchfeed. Other similar sites will display their paid advertisers first, and then the affiliate advertisers. I won't pay high clicks rates on a site like searchfeed in order to be shown on their page below listings I already have on other sites. When I go to a smaller site, I expect I should be able to pay lower click rates to display at the top.

Another site I did not try out this time around was Sprinks.com. In the past I had to constantly police my listings and constantly had fraudulent clicks. They were pretty good about investigating and refunding my money, but the time involved and the fact that it seemed nothing was done about it to keep it from happening again, just did not make it worth the effort to keep renewing with them. I was $15 short of breaking even on my investment with them, but keep in mind that everything I spent was reimbursed back to the account, so in effect I had double the dollars in my account, which made the ROI even worse in that case.

Valleyalley.com was another place I would not renew. I had one person click the JOIN free link. But I only spent $25 with them in 2002.

I barely break even with findwhat.com and recently found that I was receiving clicks from a porno website. I went to the porn website to see the page where they would display a "Christian Singles" keyword. And sure enough, they had the top 12 list of findwhat.com listings under "Christian Singles" mixed in with pictures of female body parts. Very vulgar. I wrote to that website as well as reporting this to findwhat.com. They wrote me back saying they were investigating after several misses with people who didn't bother to read my mails at all and were sending me form letters. But the last I heard was Nov. 25 and it is now Dec. 22 and I have given up.

I just checked the porno link and they still are advertising the "Christian Singles" category. I even reported this to all of the Christian websites advertised there and only heard back from 2 of them. These other two webmasters of the very popular christiancafe.com and singlec.com also indicated that they wrote and complained, but I guess findwhat.com doesn't care whether their affiliates are displaying relevant keywords, as long as findwhat.com is raking in the money from the bogus clicks. I say "bogus" clicks because if the clicks are coming from a porn website, these people are NOT interested in Christian dating, unless they are here to stir up trouble. And from all of the porn site's clicks sent to us, not ONE person clicked to JOIN FREE. So will I be renewing with FINDWHAT.COM? No.

A good advertising site should not require that you police your account all the time to protect YOURSELF from fraud. They should be doing this for their own affiliates and traffic. They should require affiliates only post relevant keywords to their site.

Lycos.com : don't recommend. Old campaign: $40 short of breaking even. New campaign: Zero ROI, one member.

inktomi.com : no. wasted my money.

I'm not going to waste my member's money on advertising that doesn't work. It is my responsibility to spend their membership fees wisely to bring in good, quality members for them. That includes NOT allowing my keywords to come from porn sites or countries that just bring in money scam artists. It includes bringing in a Christian clientele, not secular lookie-lous.

Sites I do recommend?

overture.com : isn't as good as it used to be, but still makes me some money.

looksmart.com : barely.

goclick.com : has done nicely for me. Slowly, but nicely.

Yahoo.com and google.com listings are good for me. But that isn't PPC. The PPC portion of google.com hasn't been that good for me.

If you'd like to write an article to share your experiences, please feel free to.

God bless your investments,

Nannette