AdWords vs. MyGeek’s PPC
by Sapphire (March 30, 2005)
Continuing the experiment: Google’s AdWords PPC v. MyGeek’s PPC. I’m giving them both a whirl at the same time, and here’s how they’re measuring up so far.
To be completely honest, I think I’m sucking at this on both engines, and that’s neither of their faults (obviously). I’m pretty sure the site I’m promoting has a tougher audience than some, and what I need to do is make about 30 separate ads for various keywords and really work my butt off customizing the ad campaign. Have I bothered to do that? Nah. I had another project take off in the middle of all this, so my bad.
That said, I can still see a difference. The clicks I get from MyGeek are a lot more likely to be 1 pagers (folks that click, barely even let a page load, then leave without really looking at your site) than the clicks I get from AdWords. Virtually all the one-pagers I’ve gotten from AdWords have been disregarded by Google as fraudulent clicks - they show up on my site stats, and I can tell the click came from Google (and my site’s not indexed yet, so it has to be from AdWords), but Google doesn’t charge me.
But MyGeek is charging me for one pagers. They have a fraud prevention system by which I can log in and block out certain IP’s, but it’s not from one IP. I think the reason I’m getting these clicks is because some of the search engines they run your ad on get circulated through “paid to click” schemes and other crapola, where people are paid a fraction of a cent to click. They’re not real searchers. But if I take these particular engines out of my traffic sources, I get no clicks at all. (Umax, CoolWebSearch, and a few others are the ones I’m having this problem with - Umax being the one that takes over expired domains and roosts like some sort of vulture.) I could be wrong about why this is happening, but I’m not wrong about the fact that it is happening.
Also, my 1 pagers from MyGeek give me less hits, somehow, than my 1 pagers from AdWords. The AdWords 1 pagers give me a stat of “1 page, 4 hits”. The MyGeeks give me “I page, 2 hits”. One of them was even just 1 hit. Now, if I understand correctly, a “hit” means any call from your site - like, my logo graphic. It takes about 4 hits to load a page, so the AdWords invalid clickers are actually letting a page load. The MyGeeks aren’t even bothering to do that.
So, at this point, I’m not impressed with MyGeek. My AdWords visitors - as few as they’ve been, due to my own shortcomings with tailoring the campaign - check out a few pages on my site and click a few links. Even though none of them have made me any money yet - which may indicate I’ve failed somewhere with the site - the fact that they don’t immediately leave indicates the site is at least initially interesting to them. That means the site has potential.
If I had nothing but the MyGeek campaign to go by, I’d have assumed the site was a loser.
Posted in PPC
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