Looksmart PPC traffic quality

Looking for more traffic and I already belong to the big boys so in the end I decided to try either Looksmart or Ask.

I decided on Looksmart PPC program today. I set all my keywords at .05 cents and will work up from there. Besides ROI I like my traffic per day to at least generate on average 2.2 + page views per user. After 150 clicks so far Looksmart is far below that (200 page views). I'll have to wait a day or so to get my ROI info.

How have other people faired with Looksmart. I know I'll get a lot of bad quality of traffic replies but has anyone done ok with them?

Did you find if you increased your MAX CPC you got better quality traffic or did you just get more bad traffic from the same sites?

Some of my traffic from them comes from torrent sites (which has nothing to do with my site (not the one in my sig by the way).

It's still way to early for me to pull out and I have a few things I want to try first with ads etc.., I just wanted to get a few opinions.

 

Wow no one replying, thats not good!

Just an update, No real conversions just a few leads (that don't begin to pay for the ads) and page views per user are in the crapper. Going to reset all my keywords to 2 cents and see what that does.

 

I've had poor conversions with Ask.com - waiste of money to me. someone pointed out that it might be due to click fraud.

 

I tried ask.com. I spent over $1000 there. It was a complete waste for me. Very low conversions if any. I don't even know what traffic they sent me.
Be careful with ask.com.

 

My experience:

Ask.com - 20-30% of campaigns performed VERY well, about 50% weren't that bad or good, and another 10-20% were ridiculously awful. Use all the monthly budget in 1-2 days awful. I tried to work things out with them, since it was very obviously a case of click fraud (the ads were getting 10x the traffic of the same ads/keywords on GOOGLE), but they were very unhelpful. Once those campaigns were gone, though, things were good.

Looksmart - All around bad. 1 campaign out of several dozen had a couple of conversions, but still not enough to pay for itself. Overall, a very bad experience.

Granted, this could all vary based on your keywords and campaigns. And of course, how good your ads are.

 

Thanks for your input. I run successful Yahoo and Google campaigns (I make more money than I spend) so I don't see making too many mistakes on looksmart.

I have since stopped promoting the product I started with at Looksmart and am trying another product to see if it has better performing keywords.

I have heard a few other Ask success stories so I may try them next. Do you find that at Ask, with your keywords, that a certain percentage of traffic comes from search engines? Most of my looksmart traffic comes from text ads displayed on web sites (a lot of torrent sites) which in my opinion just invite people to click on ads who mostly are just curious and not in the market for the product. I rather be in search results that generate clicks from people actively looking for information on the product.

 

I have since generated some income from clicks through Looksmart. More than enough to cover costs. One thing about my product is that it can take a while before you see a conversion. This may be a one time thing but it is enough that I plan on using looksmart another few weeks to see what happens. My Page views from them is still really low per click.

I have since tried ask.com as well and I do not like it at all. They have a min cpc setup which is in my opinion really stupid. This should be a thing set by the market. On most keywords their min cost per click rivals Google but their traffic sure doesn't. Most of it comes from abcsearch and findology which a lot of people complain about there quality.

Here are some good forum posts on the subject (hope you don't mine digitalpoint its a link to another forum):

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=12942

In my opinion (for my market anyways) the quality of clicks from looksmart and ask are probably about the same but with ask you are looking at some times over 3 times the cost per click.

 

I am currently having a bad experience with ask.com. The past day I had 100 clicks, no conversions, with stuff that I would normally convert 3-5% of the time. Given a 3% conversion rate and 100 clicks the chances that I just picked the wrong day and got unlucky is less than 5% (.97 to the 100th). I guess I'm a sadist but I'm giving it another day, mostly so I can come back here and tell everyone what happened without there being a chance that it was just bad luck.

 

The results are in. Ask has billed me for 200 clicks in the past two days and I have made no sales. In the past, as mentioned before, I have had a 3-5% success rate with traffic generated through Adwords, YSM, and MSN. The probability of this being a random happening is microscopic. I have cancelled my account with Ask, and, sadly, I have cancelled my wife's account that I had set up and failed to monitor properly (not a huge deal, lost just $150 or so). I had set it up and forgot about it, thinking she was getting a little traffic at a really low cost. Now I wonder, but cannot verify, whether she had any sales from that traffic.

 

I find with these 2nd tier ppc programs that you need almost 3 to 7 times more traffic to generate compariable number of leads with google. Of course this is only good if the cost of the keyword is 3 to 7 times less on these 2nd tier ppc programs (which is not the case with ask).

My other problems with some of these 2nd tier programs is how the links are generated. I hate spam and I do not want to spam potential customers. Some of these ppc use spyware like programs (masked as toolbars, etc..) to generate links or allow massive amounts of popups etc... What would be nice is the ability to opt out of certain type of advertising and be allowed to say I don't want any clicks from this certain number of domains.

 

Just an update

I am closing both my looksmart and ask accounts.

I am really busy now days and I probably should not have tackled 2 new ppc at the same time but the main reason for the closing is poor click quality and the interface.

Ask is complete garbage. Their click quality is beyond poor. At least with Looksmart I did generate some money, almost enough to pay for advertising.

At one point I lowered all my keywords too .02 cents. I hardly got any clicks which was fine since I just wanted to work with indiviual keywords. Then like a week later suddenly these keywords generate clicks and quickly reach my daily budget. I find it unrealistic that I went from no clicks to 1000 clicks in a day (I found out later this was due to an update in the system).

The other thing I hate is that they both use the same crappy ppc software (must be a third party tool). Both sites allows you to define campaigns and with in those campaign you can define ads. You then can add keywords to those ads. But when viewing keywords for the campaign you view all of the keywords at once, you can't view them by ads. On top of this you can't sort your list of keywords. Like in my case when my spending jumped I had to look at each keyword to see which one was generating the clicks. Plus if you update a keyword when the page reloads you start at the begining of your list again, uuuggghh..

 

Looks like you get what you pay for with ppc. I have tried a fe and money ran out in 3 days on most. Not one sale for any of the 2 tiered ppc sites.