Everyone knows about PPC Advertising on Google and Overture. But what about the smaller second tier engines like FindWhat, Kanoodle, GoClick, or any of the other dozens out there? Is it worth your time and money to bother with any of these small fish?
For larger companies selling big-ticket items, or with sites focused towards corporate professionals, advertising on these smaller engines is probably not worth the time. If you are, however, selling smaller consumer products, the likelyhood of generating qualified traffic is much greater.
In many cases you can get the number one spot for significantly less per click. For example, ‘Los Angeles Hotels’ on Overture is fetching $5 per click, but a quick check on ‘Kanoodle’ shows it at $0.14. This is a significant difference. Kanoodle also distributes results to CBS MarketWatch, Dogpile, WebCrawler, Metacrawler, and cnet search.
For sites with a low conversion rate, depending on the keywords, it may take months to generate any sales as a result of one of these PPC engines, however, if you have a relatively high conversion rate, starting with one or several of the smaller guys just may be worth it. Let it run for a month, and see what happens. If you are a smaller company with some extra time on your hands you really have nothing to lose.
When it comes down to it, there are many factors to consider and they can vary drastically from one business to another. Weigh the pros and cons; you might find that you can bump your sales enough to make it all worthwhile. The distribution of your ad with the second tier PPC engines may have less exposure, but the cost per click is also reduced drastically. While paying only pennies on the dollar (compared to the big guys) there could potentially be a significant impact on sales.