I used GoTo. I enjoyed the extra visitors but it didn't make sense to keep paying them money when the net result was weak. I tried difference web sites and products - same results.
I look at it this way... if I want to pay for banner advertising someplace, I gotta fork over $30.00 for 1000 banner impressions, and then expect between 2 and 20 clickthroughs to result from that. And actually, my product is such a niche product that this isn't going to help me much. I want to target people who are specifically looking for the products I carry... getting run-of-site banner ads someplace isn't going to help. I'd have to be very particular about the sites I picked for my ad banners.
With GoTo, I paid a $25.00 deposit about 6 months ago for my listings. I have 6 or 7 terms, all bid at about 1 penny. I'm #1 or 2 for my terms (since few people have bid on them). My terms only generate 10-15 queries per month on GoTo and I get clicked on for 5 of them on average. That's 5/15 or 33%. Not bad. Plus the people who clicked through were already searching for my products, as opposed to banner ads that nobody notices any more anyway. It costs me about 75 cents per month for this advertising, and it has more than paid for itself. Plus I filled out some survey last winter and got $5.00 in ad credits for it, which was cool. Contrast this with LinkExchange, which I also do, for which I get 1 clickthrough for every 1000 ads shown or so...
I think ad banners are going to really start losing effectiveness (as if they haven't already). Just for kicks you can check out holymarket.com and see not one, not two, but three programs out there that will "pay you" to surf the net. Basically you get to see a bunch of ad banners constantly. Thing is, you can use all 3 programs at once & get $1.50/hour for it. Not bad. I bet every college kid with a computer will sign up for it, because that's pizza money. However the downside of these types of programs are that people will be even more desensitized to these banners. They can flash all they want, but I just ignore the ones at the top of my screen (I am a poor grad student so I do use the aforementioned programs for some extra cash). Plus as the internet expands exponentially (more users every month plus existing users use the web more every month) there are exponentially more pageviews available to sell every month... it's all going to make it more difficult to have a successful ad campaign involving banners unless you've got big $$$ to blow.
I think GoTo is extremely effective advertising and I will continue to use it for every business I run, even if I'm not a GoTo shareholder.
-Mike |
