Major Pay Per Click Search Engines

  • Google AdWords:

    We consider Google AdWords among the most professional pay per click services available. There are many reasons why you should try it: the low set-up fee ($5), no minimum requirements for the daily spent, the possibility to decide your daily budget, the AdWords Discounter Tool that automatically lowers your CPC when possible and lots of others. But probably the best feature of all – as we see things (and we disagree with those that consider it a downside) – is the way AdWords urges advertisers to offer relevance and gain high click through rates. We highly recommend it.

  • Yahoo! Search Marketing ( former Overture ):

    Yahoo! Search Marketing is the main competitor of AdWords – they both reach approximately the same share of active Internet users (that is more than 80%) and are equally popular among PPC advertisers. There are few differences among these two, but the most important occurs in ranking by ad performances. On Yahoo! Search Marketing, in order to rank higher you just need to bid a higher cost per click – a thing that may not happen on AdWords, if you have a low click through rate. If you care for this aspect, once your ad running, there’s nobody going to disable it for low performances, other than you.

  • FindWhat:

    FindWhat offers a campaign scheduler, an ad-analyzer and other quality advertising tools. Overall bid price is lower than Overture. Your ads will also appear on their distribution partners like second-tier portals and search engines (CNET Search Excite, Metacrawler, Dogpile, NBCi, and Microsoft Internet Explorer Autosearch). FindWhat is growing quickly due to the strong technology it has developed that it now leases to other PPC programs.

  • Kanoodle:

    Content targeting is probably the greatest advantage from Kanoodle. Still, it manages to offer you all the other tools you need to set up and run a profitable PPC campaign: low bid prices, good distribution network and a friendly interface (keyword suggestion tool, search-spy, that tells you how many searches a keyword gets in real time, auto-schedule campaign option and more).

  • Enhance Interactive:

    The upside with Enhance Interactive is the low bid prices. The min bid is $0.03 and for that much you can bid on many keywords otherwise very expensive on Overture or AdWords. The downside is the quality of traffic, because it does not have a large distribution partner, thus is second tier. We recommend you to give it a try for a while and see how much one conversion costs with Enhance and whether this cost is comparable to what you get on other PPC programs.

  • ePilot:

    Through ePilot you get plugged in to the traffic of the 290 search engines and website partners. This PPC search engine has a very professional look and feel and takes into account the relevancy factor in ad campaigns. You can get live support Monday to Friday. There are more than 300,000 advertisers that use this PPC service.

  • Espotting:

    Espotting started as a UK based PPC search engine, estimated to have up to 100,000 advertisers as permanent users. Last year (on July 1, 2004), Espotting was bought by FindWhat and since then experienced a positive evolution, that consisted mostly in the opening towards new marketplaces. Espotting is one of the largest PPC search engines in Europe and it is worth using it when your advertising interests are with countries in this part of the world.

  • LookSmart LookListings:

    There are good things and bad things you’ll hear about LookSmart. Our advice: try it because you’ll benefit from listing on its network partners like Lycos, InfoSpace Network, CNET, Cox Interactive and Apple’s Sherlock at the unique cost of 15 cents the click. The advantage is bigger when your webpage performs well and it gets listed within the top positions. On the other hand be careful about the quality of the traffic you get from LookSmart – not all its syndication partners are search engines, and you may receive a certain amount of untargeted clicks.

  • SearchFeed:

    At SearchFeed bids start at 1 cent with no minimum monthly spending. All keywords and ads submissions are being processed within two business days. The traffic is lower than on major PPC search engines like AdWords or former Overture. You may feel this is slowing down your campaign. But, they offer geo-targeting, very low CPC, and personal contact for campaign assistance (except weekend days).

  • Search123:

    Search 123 bids also start at 1 cent per click, and there is also a policy but unlike SearchFeed, it operates in real-time, allowing immediate listings. It has distribution agreements with NetZero, Juno, WebDesk and Everyone.net. There is a proxy bid tool you can activate in your account that allows you to maintain the highest position possible based on the maximum they are willing to spend. Overall, it is worth trying.