PPC for sites other than Google

[neil@camisonline]

I was wondering if anyone has tried PPC from the likes of Bing or Yahoo's sponsored links? We know Google is the king of search, but its market share is slipping a little (not that it matters much). I am interested to find out if anyone is getting cost effective refers from other search engines using non-Google PPC?

[Steve B]

I did Yahoo a couple years ago and didn't get any responses. I probably should try again.

[Freelancier]

Depends on who your market is. I have a client using Facebook ads to reach their target audience with great success. They also use Google ads. None of my clients bother with Yahoo or Bing... they're just not where most people go to search for stuff.

[neil@camisonline]

I was wondering about Facebook, but I'm not sure how relevant it would be for my line of work.

[bulk]

Facebook works well on some niches. Although I often combine it with Google Ads. Google is cheaper in most of the cases, but Facebook brings more audience coverage. Not sure about Yahoo or Bing. Haven't heard any good responses, probably, need to do some research on that.

[KristineS]

We have used Facebook ads in the past and done quite well with them. For our market, Facebook is one of the places to be.

I tried Yahoo sponsored ads a while back, maybe three or so years ago, and got nothing. I haven' t seen anything that has motivated me to try them again.

[Freelancier]

Facebook likely will work better for personal-oriented offerings (B2C), not business-oriented (B2B) ones. Business users don't go out there looking for other businesses, they use Google for that.

The client I have who uses FB ads is one who has a bunch of dating sites.

[KennethT]

Facebook is my favorite for a number of my clients recently. I like how you can really drill down on the demographics. These clients are B2C though and not B2B. To be honest even though I am part of Google agencies etc, I do sometimes wonder about them. In certain markets it is so difficult and results so lousy that I completely ignore them.

The interesting thing about Yahoo and Bing if I look at Organic search results using those across multiple clients typically, Bing and Yahoo have much lower bounce rates, so it seems although they don't get the volume of results, the quality of their results are sometimes better.

A client of mine sells Jigsaw puzzles online and we use exclusively Yahoo. The reason for that is simply the demographic for jigsaw puzzles (women 50 years plus) also tend to use Yahoo more. The CPC on Google was so much more expensive than Yahoo, that we focused simply on Yahoo and did Google a couple of days a month and returns improved.

Now don't get me wrong, Google is still the 800lb Gorilla, but point is there are also other options for different markets and products. So start small and do ONE at a time, when you are happy with what you have and understand it better increase the budget.

Good Luck.

[MikeTaylor]

I have started offering press releases as an alternative to PPC. The last 3 PRs I put up each got 300 reads in a couple of days, and one of those over 350 reads in 24 hours. Those clicks to the PR were between $1,600 and $7,000 worth of PPC clicks for some of the KWs I targeted. Pick-ups of news releases occupy more spaces in the search results, and in one case, my client with the PR was the only result on the page in our state.
Free PR sites may give you some results, but the one I use has manual reviews to maintain the integrity of the service (and it's effectiveness). It is not cheap, but results happen withing minutes of a PR being approved and published and you get a lot more clicks for a lot lower cost.

[LGCG]

I've heard good things about Yahoo and Bing. Of course, I haven't tried them...

[Freelancier]

I have started offering press releases as an alternative to PPC. The last 3 PRs I put up each got 300 reads in a couple of days, and one of those over 350 reads in 24 hours

One of my companies, I was spending about $300/month for 3 years trying to get PPC traction. But I also was putting out press releases. I shut down the PPC last year and the press releases (because now we're on the first page of a search for a primary keyword) are driving all my traffic, which turns out to be better quality at almost no cost now. So I put out a press release a couple of times a year for about $400 per release and I better benefits. But it won't work everywhere, because some of my other companies would just get lost in the noise with press releases.

[LGCG]

One of my companies, I was spending about $300/month for 3 years trying to get PPC traction. But I also was putting out press releases. I shut down the PPC last year and the press releases (because now we're on the first page of a search for a primary keyword) are driving all my traffic, which turns out to be better quality at almost no cost now. So I put out a press release a couple of times a year for about $400 per release and I better benefits. But it won't work everywhere, because some of my other companies would just get lost in the noise with press releases.

Good point, Freelancier. I'm a big fan of PPC, but I think once your website has got enough traction for SEO, you can definitely scale back your PPC efforts.