Which Search Engines Work Best? A Pay Per Click Study
Let’s face it, most people don’t track their advertising at all and therefore don’t know where their leads or sales are coming from. I’ve talked with dozens of business owners about which online advertising vehicles work best for them. What I usually hear is that they are impressed with the sites that give them the highest number of clicks. Sure, clicks are encouraging, but do they tell the whole story?
No, the number of clicks or the cost per click (average CPC) does not tell the whole story. Not even close. At the end of the day, it’s not how much you spend per click that really counts – what’s important is how much you spend PER CONVERSION (a truly qualified prospect). And finally, of course, it’s the cost per sale that really matters.
I have been doing pay per click campaigns for some time now. The following are my findings after testing pay-per-click campaigns from September 2006 through February 2007 on the following search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Mamma, Lycos, 7Search and GoClick.
When testing, I chose the same keywords for each campaign and used separate but exact duplicate lead capture pages. This allowed me to see which keyword buys would give me the highest % of qualified prospects. My focus was the “Cost of Conversion” which was the percentage of people who requested more information about my program (a good prospect). My goal was to get clear indication as to the quality of the traffic coming from each search engine.
By taking the average cost-per-click and looking at the % of prospects that requested more information (Name, Phone # & E-mail Address), it gives me the real cost of a qualified lead. Following are the results:
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7Search -$0.67 (CPC) $4.04 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Google -$0.83 (CPC) $5.46 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
MSN- $0.70 (CPC) $6.30 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Mamma -$0.34 (CPC) $7.39 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Yahoo -$0.81 (CPC) $8.45 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Lycos -$0.12 (CPC) $17.14 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
Go Click -$0.28 (CPC) $20 – (Cost of Qualified Lead)
For a spreadsheet view, follow this link http://www.myedconline.com/Adstudy.html
The study was conducted over several months. After trying to tweak the Lycos and Go Click campaign for about a month, I decided to drop them both. It is also important to note that my conversions decreased over time. This underscores the importance of changing the look and feel of the lead capture page from time to time. After fine tuning these campaigns, I must say that both 7Search and Google are my favorites. When looking at actual sales, Google does beat 7Search by a 30% margin (which means that the actual cost per sale is about the same – not pictured on chart above), but both work extremely well.
As you can see, if I just looked at the cost per click but ignored conversions, I could have wasted a lot of money on the wrong vehicles.
The lesson here is – clicks are good, but conversion and sales are even better! Take the time to gather deeper information on all aspects of your advertising vehicles. If you do, your marketing dollars will bring you five to ten times better returns.
The article is brought to you by Peter Grundner at P&T Enterprises.
Pete Grundner
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/which-search-engines-work-best-a-pay-per-click-study-121978.html
URGENT HELP: My computer is in chaos, I need need urgent help please?
URGENT MESSAGE FOR EVERYONE OUT THERE:
Hi,
I am in an urgent position and need immediate help for my laptop. I am writing this message from my mum’s old computer as my current laptop is in chaos.
Here’s what happened:
1) I bought my new Windows Vista laptop about 2 months ago. I downloaded Norton 360 on it and everything was going fine up till about 3 weeks time. Normally when Norton 360 is working, it shows a green tick but, when it is not it shows a red cross. My Norton 360 showed neither and was completely unresponsive. I couldn’t get Norton 360 to perform anything, it didn’t even open. This was because of a ‘Bad Image error’ – I have no idea what this is. After that an error message kept coming up every half an hour or so and said – ‘Windows LIVE COM MODULE has stopped working’. I had no idea what this was either. The same ‘Bad Image’ error that appeared when trying to open Norton 360 also appeared when I tried to download Google Earth and Java, and prevented me downloading them.
2) I knew there was something wrong, so I scanned my computer for a potential virus with my other protection software ‘ Drive Sentry ‘ and it found no threats or virus’s on my computer. So I took a print-screen of the ‘Bad Image error’ that appeared when trying to open up Norton, to PC World. They told me to re-install Norton 360.
3) Even when I tried to remove Norton 360 from the Control panel, the same ‘Bad Image error’ would appear, which even prevented me from un-installing Norton. I was stuck, so I searched this problem on the Internet and someone suggested to download the ‘Norton Removal Tool’ which removes Norton from my computer with absoloutley no problem. As a last resort I downloaded the Norton Removal Tool. In the end, it removed Norton, but it was VERY suspicous and restarted my computer. After restarting the computer, my Drive Sentry Protection software gave me a pop-up on my sidebar saying
- "38655 Infections detected, YOUR COMPUTER IS AT RISK" –
I clicked on it and it said it ‘synchronized’ all of the trojan horses and worms etc….. I did not know what exactly ‘synchronized’ meant.
3) After this I scanned my computer several times with Drive Sentry and Windows defender. Drive Sentry said it found no virus’s, but in the middle of scanning, Windows Defender encountered a problem and had to shut itself down. I started to get really worried.
4) Anyway, I decided to re-install Norton 360. It worked fine but then, an error message came up saying "The Symantec Live Engine stopped working, Windows is trying to find a solution to the problem". Of course after an hour of waiting, no solution had been found.
I was VERY scared by now and tried to open internet explorer, Internet explorer opened but my homepage never appeared, it stayed white for about one and a half hours. At that moment, I also realized my sidebar that normally appears in Vista had disapeared. No programs were responding and many errors were coming up. The computer wouldn’t even shut down. After a lot of frustration, I manually turned the computer off. I am too afraid to turn it on right now and have no idea what to do.
- PLEASE HELP – I have never been in such a mess before and need my computer back up and working very soon for my University studies. Sorry about the long windedness of my question, but I tried to give as many details as possible. PLEASE can you give the best and most accurate answers for solutions in your knowledge.
All answers appreciated,
The Count
Anybody out there with a decent answer? I only have 3 days left to write my 35 page essay, and my teachers said I had to use another computer or start over. About 20 pages of my work are on that computer so far, so I really do not want to delete them all.
PLEASE help soon! I’d really appreciate it!
I will tell you this right now.. get rid of norton.
It’s a peice of junk.
If your looking for security go with malwarebytes(malwarebytes.com)
And if you want to remove norton open up msconfig(type that in start-> run) and go to services and find anything that has to do with norton and uncheck the boxes.
Then it should remove norton.
If you can’t do anything on your PC boot in safe mode.(Google how to boot into safemode)
References :
I hate to say this but I think it’s time to whip out the Re installation CD.
It sounds like you have a real mess in there, so save what files you can, nuke the rest and start over.
You may want to get another opinion, but that’s all i got.
References :
Of course, what a great site and informative posts, I will add backlink – bookmark this site? Regards,
Latest numbers I could find:
Per year in the world: Number of abortions per year: Approximately 42 Million
Number of abortions per day: Approximately 115,000
UNITED STATES
Number of abortions per year: 1.37 Million (1996)
Number of abortions per day: Approximately 3,700
How can people ignore this? How can it be legal to kill this many children per year? God's heart has to break!!
The same outcome as when Reagan gave the command…It would get really loud, the crowd would go crazy, and then the boys would go racing! This would all happen after the innvocation, presenting the colors, and the singing of the National Anthem.