I wanted to experiment with pay-per-click engines. What attracted me was the attractive sign-up offers many of the engines offer, and I deposited some money at findology.com. If these sites are valid, then sure I'm new to this so I might not make much, but if I am paying anything like the true value of a click then with a bonus offer I should make a small profit, while I'm learning how to optimize bang for keyword buck. If I could spend $25 on a keyword and it makes me $25, then I should break-even and still have some free clicks to make a profit with, indeed I should make a profit even with mildly negative ROI. This might sound naive, but I have well over $100,000 from online casino promotional offers over the last few years, so it didn't seem too far-fetched to try the same thing out with ppc engines, which *I Thought* would be a comparatively reputable industry. I put down $25 with Findology.com to take advantage of their $50 bonus. The site looked professional and persuasive. Then I started researching and found to my horror that no one seems to have a good word to say about them. Click fraud seems to be endemic with them, and apparently all of the second-tier search engines. Some gentleman on another site said simply "Click-fraud is the model" with second-tier ppc's. Now I'm thinking I wasted my $25, and my approach isn't going to work. True to expectation Findology haven't bothered to respond to any e-mails I've sent them and seem to have welched on their free offer. However, I could be reading too much into some negative comments from people who are either very bad at maximizing the value from ppc engines, or just plain unlucky. In the online gambling world you will see many comments from sore losers who think a given casino is rigged, but who don't understand the mathematics of gambling or are just very bad players. Maybe this is similar. That said, even the ppc commentators who seem to be credible and aren't hustling affiliate links don't have very much to say that is good about the second-tier joints. I'd really appreciate some perspective from people on this forum as to the value of the second-tier engines. I haven't heard from anyone who is using them profitably: but if that is the case, are these engines simply ripoff joints? How come they haven't been closed down (or is this about to happen?). If there are exceptions I'd like to hear of people's experiences. Also, do you think my "bonus hustling" strategy could fly, or am I just going to get turned over? Should I just stick with Yahoo and Google? (Sorry for all the questions and the lack of brevity)
They're any web surfer's PITA. Same for the advertiser paying for the clicks. If there's no value to the end user, there's ultimately not going to be much value to the owner. Say someone searches Google and clicks my AdWords ad. Then checks out some more search results, as they do. One of them is such a PITA 2nd tier 'search engine' (my ass). Visitor clicks on such a PPC result, which happens to be my ad via Overture. Thanks, that costs me twice at no benefit to the person browsing. Do something useful instead. That's my advice.
Misery loves company, so most reviews of services on the net tend to be complaints while the people who enjoy the service are to busy enjoying the service they paid for than go trolling for other people who got ripped off! Of course saying that I have been in the process for the last year or so trying different PPC services. Almost all have been failures for me and I hate to say it findology (and abcsearch) are about the worse for click quality (beyond bad for several different markets I have tried). I have yet to find one positive post in regards to them. Unfortunately they also supply clicks to other ppc services like looksmart and ask.com. The PPC people have to smarten up and not just buy any old click from people. One feature they need to add is the ability to specify which domains you want to remove from receiving clicks from. I would have stayed with looksmart expect for the fact I could not block out the s***y findology clicks. This way not only can advertisers receive the clicks they want but the PPC service would know which of their partners are providing them with bad clicks. Everyone would win.
I stopped with 2nd tier SE advertising over a year ago, because of click fraud and the fact no one really uses them. SO to get 100 clicks on a term in one day you know it is fraud.
You may want to give 7search.com a try. The chances of finding good sub .05 clicks is good there. In some instances, you can find clicks for .01 For a second tier...it's not a bad bet.
Thanks for all responses, (though a bit depressing). I'll certainly check out 7search. Looks like I paid Findology $25 for a guy in Hungary to click on my webpage 2500 times. Just on a final note: is it the case that click fraud exists down to all levels? How does a click fraudster make money out of .01 priced clicks? Surely that is not worthwhile? As I stated I'm pursuing a fairly low-level scheme based on taking advantage of introductory offers, so maybe I could have more luck buying obscure keywords?-it seems most of you are big-budget guys. No? I guess I'm reaching here....