Why Small Pay Per Click Search Engines are Usually Not the Answer

I think I see a similar thread about once a month or so. What small engine provides underpriced traffic?

Many people tend to be stuck on a product or service or marketing angle. We tend to view these as good and then place our problems on others.

• Overture and AdWords are too expensive.

• blah doesn't provide enough traffic.
• blah has too low of traffic quality.
• etc.

Before looking to smaller engines I usually recommend creating a product or service offering which does decent on AdWords OR Overture.

Google AdWords and Overture have some fundamental significant differences in how they operate which means that some ads can fail on one and succeed on the other. If an offering fails on both networks then refine it. Change the offering. Target the ads better. Bid on a different position. Position 1.0 might be the guy who is losing the most money. There are lots of things you can change.

When people just give up on Overture and AdWords it means that they are settling for

• small streams of traffic

• slow feedback loops
• potentially lower traffic quality. If the traffic source is a good one why would they partner with a second rate PPC instead of one of the larger ones?

All that combines to likely lead to small streams of sales.

If you can't compete on the larger networks refine until you can. Create a profit stream and then look to duplicate the results.

If you corner yourself to the smallest networks as time passes you may be continually marginalized until your business goes under.