Pay Per Click Search Engine Reviews

My opinions and reviews of my personal experience with various search engines

***** Excellent Rating:

1. Google Adwords. This is the top of the heap pay-per-click service. They have some strict regulations, but it is very easy to sign up and set up an ad campaign. Excellent tools for researching keywords. Their recommended budget numbers are usually very high. Make sure you change them manually. The nicest thing is that your ads start showing almost immediately. They do not make you wait until someone manually approves it. I recommend trying very low bids on keywords first, then gradually increase the most effective ones. (They have conversion tracking). Google search gives you the most real traffic by far with low click fraud. Minimum click price is .01, but keywords anywhere near that cheap are hard to find. (Credit cards only -$5 fee to open account)

2. Yahoo Search Marketing (Formerly Overture). Excellent service. Excellent Tools. The only downside is the delay in campaign approvals. Minimum click price is .10.Yahoo! Sponsored Search lists your business on top sites like Yahoo!, AltaVista and CNN. Sign up and get a $25 credit. (Credit cards only)

**** Good Rating:

3. Looksmart. Good alternative, second tier search engine. Low click fraud, but not as low as Google or Yahoo. They have excellent tools and reporting. Clicks start at $0.01. You can actually find keywords that rank pretty high at low cost. Nowhere near the traffic you get from Google or even Yahoo, but it is fairly good quality. Visit Looksmart

*** OK

4.GoClick. Not quite as good as Looksmart. Good tools. Fairly low click fraud. They have some unusual keyword options, some of which are cheaper than a penny a click, but the traffic quality is very low. The standard keyword options recommend prices to allow them to be viewed on their network of affiliated search engines. Spending the same money on Google will get you better results in most cases. If you don't have a credit card, they accept Paypal. GoClick

**1/2 Sort Of OK

5. 1Second. A good, honest site. Lately, for some reason their search volume has dropped severely in my opinion (based on experience). I have only been able to spend about $10 in clicks in maybe 4 months with around 200 keywords. This tells me that they do not have a click fraud problem. Maybe you can find a product or keyword that does better than I did. Visit 1second.com

** Not OK

6. Brainfox. If you want traffic that never buys anything, try them. I believe that they default to serving some kind of pop-under on certain sites and count them as clicks. I am really not sure of this. The last few emails I sent (maybe 6 months ago) were never answered. Clicks start at .01. In my opinion they're not worth it. They do accept Paypal.

* Unbelievably Frustrating

7. MSN search. I had a traumatic experience dealing with them. They took a day or two to approve ads and keywords. They seemed to reject just about everything. When I emailed them asking why they were rejected, they referred to the terms and conditions. When you read the T's&C's you still have no idea why they were rejected. I am not sure that the people answering the emails understood English very well. After I sent them a scathing letter expressing my disgust, for a week or two after I was still receiving emails stating that more and more of my keywords were rejected. I hope someone can figure out how to deal with these people. I don't care what kind of payments they take. I won't even put their link here. Do I sound upset?

-10 stars

8. Auto surf programs in general. They send you tons of traffic from people that are interested in nothing but getting more crap traffic to their sites. Most of the time they're not even looking at their screen.