Pay Per Click Universe | PPC Journal

A Message From The Executive Office

I hope that everyone is having a wonderful holiday season. Now it is the New Year, our staff is returning to our regular schedule, and we will continue to bring you fresh articles, reviews and news every single week on our website, as well as our monthly newsletter.

To start 2005 off with a new twist, we have decided to dedicate the entire month of January to reviewing a slightly different breed of Pay Per Click search engines. Many advertisers are not yet familiar with these search engines, but they are extremely popular with consumers and can be very productive for retailers. Some of you may already have guessed that I am talking specifically about shopping comparison portals, which include high-traffic sites such as: bizrate.com, nextag.com, mysimon.com, shopping.com, pricegrabber.com, among many others.

These sites are very popular among consumers because they provide them with reviews, price comparisons and other resources needed to make educated buying decisions. From an advertiser’s perspective, they allow retailers to put all of their products up and simply bid against each other for the best listings. You can generally start with a $25 deposit and with a little experience with regular Pay Per Click search engines, managing an ad campaign on these type of sites should prove to be relatively easy and soon familiar.

Each week in January, we will bring you a review of the largest shopping comparison search engines, as well as other information that will help you get started. Look for the first review in this newsletter.

We’d like to thank each and every one of you for subscribing to our newsletter, visiting our website and helping us help you get the most out of the benefits of the pay-per-click mode of advertising with your comments and feedback in 2004. On behalf of everyone at MordComm, Inc., and PayPerClickUniverse, we wish you a happy and productive New Year!

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We would like to take this opportunity to thank a new site sponsor – Enhance Interactive – for their support:

· Enhance offers you the option of creating your own PPC campaign or having their resident experts design a PPC ad tailored to your specifications

· Customer-oriented - offers live chat support for clients

· LogoLinks program provided free for the first month that places a small version of your logo next to your ad for extraordinary personalization

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Recent Pay-Per-Click News and Announcements

FightClickFraud.com Provides Resources for the Prevention of Online Advertising Fraud

Baltimore, MD, December 20, 2004 - TrackingROI announces the launch of FightClickFraud.com, a platform to help increase online advertising ROI by detecting click fraud and improving advertising effectiveness. Click fraud poses a threat to all online businesses and advertisers who utilize Pay-Per-Click advertising. The FightClickFraud.com community provides resources that allow these advertisers to learn about this threat, track and report suspicious activity and then eliminate any potential threats at the source.

Click fraud, or click spamming, occurs when a person or program accesses a URL with no intention of browsing the site, purchasing a product or performing any other type of conversion action. Sometimes individuals perpetrate this activity for fun but often times, competing companies use the strategy in order to drive up advertising costs for the ad sponsor. Some “pirates” will even hire others to work the scam from international locations, making it very difficult to prosecute the offenders.

Google’s Chief Financial Officer George Reyes recently expressed his belief that click fraud poses the biggest threat to the Internet economy. As old as the Internet itself, this fraudulent activity is not the “cost of doing business” online as it has been defined, as companies lose millions of dollars every month as a result. Read the entire press release here.

SearchFeed Offers New On-Site Search Options to Retail Sites

Searchfeed.com, a leader in pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising, announced today (December 14, 2004) new, on-site search options for Internet retailers. Through a partnership with Ace-Installer.com, Searchfeed.com will offer webmasters the ability to install various search features enabling both on-site product inventory searches and sponsored search results. Read the entire press release here.

Google Provides Targeted Advertising to Buy.com

On November 16, 2004, Buy.com, the Internet Superstore, and Google Inc. announced the launch of an advertising partnership that delivers Google AdWords advertisements to Buy.com's customers. As part of the agreement, Google's targeted, text-based ads appear on Buy.com's website through the Google AdSense program.

"The partnership between Google and Buy.com furthers both companies' mission statements, which are customer-centric," stated Neel Grover, president of Buy.com. "By adding Google's targeted ads to Buy.com, we are giving our customers additional, highly-relevant resources with which to make an informed buying decision." Read the entire press release here.

Special Offers Available for Pay-Per-Click Users Through Pay Per Click Universe

Visit our Special Offers page to view all our current specials, but here is an example of one of the great deals currently available:

SuperPages – Local search for PPC is hot. SuperPages is offering a $25 credit plus a free business profile. This is a limited time offer, so check the special offer out and see if you want to try an ad campaign with one of the largest players on the internet!

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We would like to take this opportunity to thank one of our newest sponsors – GoClick– for their support:

· GoClick has no startup fees, no monthly fees, and a low 1 cent CPC minimum bid

· Over 7.2 billion targeted searches per year

· Over 23,000 business owners use GoClick

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Shopping Comparison Site Reviews for January 2005

Review Number One - NexTag

The first of the shopping comparison search engines I have chosen to review this month is NexTag, a site that has changed enormously from its earlier emphasis on computers and electronics. Primarily in 2004, NexTag made numerous changes to make it a more complete shopping site, with a sophisticated look and feel and performance that ensured its placement in the Top 5 shopping comparison sites currently available for pay-per-click advertisers.

"The more traditional comparison shopping categories (computers, electronics, clothing, home and garden) take the user through the expected step-by-step process of narrowing their search by not just type of product (e.g., monitor), but also using parameters of sub-type of the product (e.g., size or type of monitor), manufacturer or brand name (e.g., Dell), before coming up with search results. The search results consists of an image of the product, a link to details regarding it, user ratings, a price range, and a link to the seller. The user continues in this fashion until he or she has located the product they want at a price and manufacturer that suits them.

Of course, if you wish to browse available products more quickly, NexTag has a search function that can be carried out by category. There is also an option to save recently viewed products for comparison shopping purposes. Read more ...

Hint Of The Month

Instead of putting all your advertising dollars into one PPC ad campaign, spread your dollars around! Try new PPC search engines and experiment with the second tier niche PPC search engines. Although traffic may be much lower on these smaller search engines, conversion rates from visitors to buyers (and therefore ROI) often turns out to be higher than your more expensive campaigns on the larger engines. Many of the smaller engines require as little as $25 to open an account. Just keep in mind that timely and quality customer service from your PPC search engine is key to the success of any ad campaign.

And finally,

Thanks for reading this edition of the Pay Per Click Journal. We value your comments and hope you will look forward to receiving our next edition.

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We would like to take this opportunity to thank another of our current sponsors – SearchFeed – for their support:

· Thousands of leading web properties integrate Searchfeed.com's content

· Searchfeed.com's network generates hundreds of millions of searches monthly

· Millions of unique keywords ensure relevancy and coverage of sponsored results

· Concentration on the personal touch with an emphasis on personal assistance

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Pay Per Click Journal Editor - Frances Krug