I don't know about you all but, ask.com paid search spent my budget the fastest out of all others I was using (i.e. google, yahoo, msn) and returned absolutely nothing for me. The sales rep had the nerve to send me an email, inquiring about my continuation with the program. I'd consider using them again but, I defintely would only bid on SPECIFIC keywords/phrase, as they broad match will have you spending and spending!
I'd have to agree too - Ask.com's does have a fast churning rate, faster than Yahoo. (never tried Adwords, as my quality score is always too low) when you say it returned nothing for you, what metric do you use to base that on?
I overlooked at how much traffic I was getting from Ask.com affiliates this last couple weeks. Look to see if it is coming from findology.com and primosearch.com. From what I can see on my stats it is pure click fraud. I will be disputing these charges with my credit card company, I suggest you do the same. This is the second time I have noticed this and I will not continue to get scammed by this company.
Hi I have always stuck to Google and Yahoo paid listings. I will steer clear of Ask.com as I have been considering widening my paid for listings. Thanks for the feedback about your experiences
I have been able to get Ask to work for many of my campaigns. I am very difficult to please as I have very complex on page metrics that allow me to measure every bit of dta on every ad click from keyword origination to engagement with the site (based on a weightedpoint schedule).
@ chrise - very true, very true, huh? I will look into that further as I truly don't see how ask.com can receive so many more clicks than the true search engines do for me (google/yahoo).
They do buy ad traffic (like Yahoo and MSN) from third party networks like ABCSearch and 7search which sometimes can create these bursts of traffic - which may or may not be quality traffic. I would talk with your rep and ask about these clicks.
Funny you mentioned "FINDOLOGY.COM" Here's an email I sent to my Ask.com Rep..a month ago.. They ofcourse ask me to work with their tech people to block it..etc..but I didn't bother cuz I got the credits for free. I'm sticking with Adwords and Yahoo and MSN... FACEBOOK SUcks too! See the letter I sent.. Hi xxxx, """I was wondering if there is a way to ban one of the search engines from putting up my campainge. So far in my logs, all traffic generated from one of your partner search engine - http://www.findology.com generates traffic that is very useless for my website. And the traffic that comes from that search partner always comes in burst of 4 to 6 clicks at a short period of time. To me traffic generated from findology.com is junk traffic and is useless. I have over 30 clicks from them with visitors leaving right away which is not typical in comparison to other Ads I use with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Let me know if this is possible."""
This is why i stay away from ppc advertiseing its just to risky unless ur some kinda pro at it or alot of experiance.