Most successful PPC campaigns include Google and Yahoo almost as a default setting. But there are other resources out there for paid search advertising that can provide some very profitable traffic.
Google Keyword Bidding Getting ExpensiveGoogle and Yahoo are huge and give advertisers a vast reach. Plus, the time you spend creating and managing your paid search efforts is highly leveraged because of the incredible volume of traffic that passes through their networks.
This success, efficiency and reach has also made profitable advertising increasingly difficult for smaller and medium sized companies to generate profitable business as it was in the good old days (five years ago). Why? Because you are now in competition with every company inside your industry for your essential keywords. And, as we all should know from our economics 101 classes when competition for a finite resource increases the price will go up accordingly. Plus, as we all should know from our business 101 classes when the cost of selling goes up profitability goes down.
Alternative Pay Per Click NetworksAs more big advertisers pile on the Google keywords you want are getting more and more expensive. As a smaller advertiser you can either try to target tighter niche areas of your market, move into new product areas or find alternate sources of targeted traffic to keep the cost of advertising low enough to remain profitable.
The Benefits of Alternate Pay Per Click Networks- If you have a dedicated budget for PPC advertising but are unable to get enough clicks without exceeding your allowable cost per click
- You are serving a highly targeted niche market
- You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket
Alternative networks let you tap into niche audiences with more targeted traffic usually at a lower cost. You are likely to find the lower traffic volume generated by good quality alternate networks offset by higher conversions and ROI.
Alternative PPC Networks Worth A LookMIVA – nice cost per click, low volume, decent conversion
Looksmart – reasonable prices with moderate traffic
Enhance – very low volume, good conversion
Searchfeed – low volume, high conversion rates, more competition
A Couple Of Niche PPC NetworksBusiness.com – good targeted b2b traffic
Thomasnet – a good spot to reach industrial buyers, government and military buyers. However it requires manual reporting, weak tracking and metrics. Hint: use on-site analytics to keep tabs on your spending and conversions
The only way to find out what works for you is to experiment with them. Try allocating a certain percentage of your time and money to these alternative sources and you should be pleasantly surprised.
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When client we have worked with planning direct mail promotions very often we are asked the question, "what response can we expect from this mailing?"