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Just thought I’d share a quick experience I’ve had these past couple weeks dealing with the smaller search engines. I’m sure others have had great success with them and this post isn’t meant to be any “guide”, it’s just what I’ve experienced.

I have a niche running now and it’s doing very well, actually better than any campaign I’ve ever run. My big meat of traffic here came from Google, but I wanted to expand and test out a bunch of smaller traffic sources to see what would happen and try and boost the revenue up a little more. Here’s what I tested and how it went :

Looksmart - always hated Looksmart but figured I’d test it. Sent a bunch of clicks with 0 conversions, total bust here and I’ll probably never even bother with them again.

Ask.com - this was the highest volume, I hit my $250 budget easily every day. Shame I spent $750 without a single conversion, the links were working and everything so it was just the traffic. No beans here.

Miva - this was my first time playing around with Miva. Their system is horrible and errored out a hundred times before I just gave up with it. Send a few clicks in a few days before I just paused it. Bust.

MSN/Yahoo - these guys are 2 of the big 3, but I’ve just grown to dislike them more and more over time, especially Yahoo. Yahoo tries to copy Google in almost every aspect and just fails bigtime over it. MSN isn’t too bad, I guess I just have bad luck over there because it doesn’t convert that well.

Pretty much I learned that with this niche at least, I’m going to stick primarily to Google content. It’s just not worth it to mess with the others when even if they profited, would make 1/20 of what Google makes because of the drop in volume.

And in general, I’ll probably just stick with Google, Facebook, and Myspace for my traffic sources. They’re all a pain to work with in 1 way or another, but they all do work if you can figure them out.

Popularity: 13% [?]

One thing you may not be doing with your campaigns is demographic targeting. Demographic targeting allows you to target whichever audience you want to push your product too.

A few months ago Adwords released demographic targeting for content campaigns. You can also target by demographics in MSN adCenter, and with traffic sources like Facebook.

Why target by demographic?

The answer here is pretty simple…because your traffic can be much more targeted and convert much higher. You’ll see a volume decrease as you won’t be targeting everybody, but being able to hand pick who sees your ad can put you at a big advantage. You’ll be able to push your bid prices up and get on top of the competition while still profiting.

Demographic targeting examples…

In it’s simplest form, the best example is that most offers you’ll want to limit to everybody over the age of 18. Most offers (aside from ringtones, etc.) require some sort of credit card, or require the person to be 18 years old. Right here we’re chopping away clicks from little kids that are useless.

Now let’s think of another easy product like wrinkle-cream, I’ve seen offers for this. An 18 year old girl probably isn’t going to be that interested in getting rid of wrinkles, but maybe she’d do some research on it for her mom or something. I’d target everybody 30 and up for a campaign like this.

How about ringtones? Older people aren’t as likely to go through with the purchase, so you may want to set your campaigns and target everybody 25 and under.

One thing you can do is talk to your affiliate networks and try to gather data on the offer you’re running. See if the advertiser has any sort of demographic reports that you can look over and apply to your campaigns.

Just something to think about, hopefully it can give you a little better ROI.

Popularity: 6% [?]