Jun 13 2007
Dave Davis on PPC Engines
By Jeremy Schoemaker
24 comments 
What Is Your Favorite Search Engine?
Ask.com. Without a doubt. Ask sponsored listings are an absolute goldmine and many of the non technical markets have little to no competition. Ask.com also has very few technical users which are perfect for converting the non technical offer. Some of my sites I have seen conversion rates of 80% on Ask as opposed to a mere 10%-15% on AdWords. Not everyone is a Google geek.
Dave Davis
Managing Director
RedFly Marketing LTD
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I didnt realize Ask.com ran their own ads - Thanks for this heads up!
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Very interesting… I also didn’t know they ran their own ads either…
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I’ve never heard anybody else say anything good about Ask’s PPC. Ever since your “assume I’m getting something on the side for anything I say” post, I always take advice from here with huge grains of salt now.
Back to ASK: 1. the volume is low 2. short tail searches are expensive (I looked). I don’t see how you can get enough long tail in there to drive any kind of volume.
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neither did I. Did you have any luck with dating leads with ask? I have been experimenting with google and none of my clicks turned into leads for the site i’m pushing a free profile for.
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Me neither. I’ve used Miva in the past and did not like the results. I may have to add Ask into the rotation.
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Ask is weird (In a good way). It still uses AdWords but sponsoredlistings.ask.com is their own. You all say you didn’t know ask had it’s own… That was my point
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Ask.com indeed does offer a pretty nice niche market.
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The volume IS low, that’s a given. That was not my reasoning though. I like it for some markets because it CONVERTS better with that smaller volume.
And regarding the short tail searches, I never had to pay more than 7 cents a click for the markets I operate in.
I agree, a LOT of longtail keywords never see the light of day with ask when you might get one a month with Google.
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What niche is that?
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I think this is news to a lot of us.
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I’ve tested Ask and it does well for certain topics and doesn’t convert for others; so testing is definitely a must when running ads on Ask.
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I believe they also pull from YSM/overture ads also.
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What I find kind of annoying with Ask is their minimum bids. Example, I’ll select a keyphrase with 3 competitors, and it’ll say minimum bid $1.58…..anyone seeing same?
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This was unfamiliar to me, too, until I read about it on here — interesting stuff.
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What percentage of the search market does Ask get?
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A little under 2% I believe.
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My experience was not with affiliate marketing but for managing PPC campaigns for companies themselves.
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I guess that will depend on your market.
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I have been running ask related ads for about a month now. My site is fairly low traffic and it seems tech type stuff doesnt convert too well. However, I have heard of good results in other niches.
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I think testing is a must every time you run ads be it Ask or not. Even Adwords won’t convert very well if not properly tested.
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Are ask ads only available in USA or is UK included too?
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eh…. never try on ask.com
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The UK is included too. It’s kind of hard to figure out how to display in both though.
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Why not?
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