The Dollar Factory

Case Study: ExactSeek.com flat fee keyword advertising

Everyone knows that Google is the king of search engines with a 50% share of the marketplace followed by Yahoo! Search and Microsoft Live (former MSN.) Each of these three major players allows advertisers to purchase text ads that appear next to organic search results for specific keywords. I am talking of course about keyword advertising programs such as AdSense, Overture and AdCenter. These programs are very successful for those who can afford to pay the high price for the top keywords.

There are many smaller search engines that provide pay per click (PPC) keyword advertising programs at a much lower price. Are they really worth the attention of cash strapped webmasters or are such programs a waste of time and money? I have performed a simple experiment to measure the effectiveness of one such program offered by ExactSeek.

ExactSeek offers a very tempting keyword bidding program that allows a webmaster to buy placement for a text ad for a flat monthly fee. The ads appear as sponsored results on the ExactSeek search engine as well as its partner network of over 225 search engines and directories. The cost for advertising on such a large number of sites is small. Specifically, they charge $12 for 3 months guaranteeing top 10 placement of your ad. That would be a very affordable $4 a month. In addition ExactSeek gives large discounts for the purchase of multiple keywords or year long packages. For example, buying 6-11 keywords for 3 months costs $10 per keyword and it is further discounted for the 1 year term at $30 instead of $40 for each keyword. There are even larger discounts for buying more keywords.

I purchased a single but competitive keyword that would be very expensive to buy on AdWords. The keyword was “soccer.” I had an ad for my soccer related website and it made sense to target this keyword something I could not afford on the larger search engines. My main goal was to drive some traffic to the site hoping that some of it will stick. My soccer site is not designed to sell affiliate products but instead generates revenue from displaying PPC contextual ads. I only purchased the one keyword for a 3 month term to see what kind of traffic ExactSeek and its partner network can drive to my site. Luckily, ExactSeek provides statistics about the number of clicks on your ad per week and in total. These are just the most basic statistics but honestly I really didn’t care for anything more from them. I already use a separate analytics software package to analyze my site’s traffic.

So what are the results? After the 3 months were through, ExactSeek reported that my ad received a total of 240 clicks. Considering that I had paid $12, the average cost for each click was 5 cents. The cost was definitely much smaller than I would have to pay on AdWords for the same keyword. The total number of visitors that I received was not enough to generate any significant revenue from PPC advertising but according to my analytics software, on average, visitors coming from the ExactSeek network looked at 4-5 pages on the site. This was a little better than I was getting from organic search results so I would say that ExactSeek is capable of driving quality traffic.

I was pleased with the performance of my small ad campaign with ExactSeek and I am planning another one. This time, I will buy a few more keywords that will target a larger audience. The way that keyword prices on the large networks (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) are constantly increasing, it makes sense to take advantage of the more affordable but smaller networks such as ExactSeek.