With all the talk about Google, Yahoo and MSN all the time, the little guys tend to get left out. By little guys, I mean second tier search engines like business.com, 7search.com, ask.com etc.
I’m currently using Business.com for one of my clients and I’m getting decent results. It’s important for PPC advertisers to realize there is more to this world other than Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you’ve exhausted all of your options and really need to generate additional leads, do yourself a favor and check out some of the more popular second tier search engines.
In this post I’ll go over the one I’m working in right now, Business.com.
Business.com is a search engine and a B2B directory. The search engine aspect of business.com works closely to how the top three work with Paid listings and organic listings. Business.com allows you to add ‘listings’ instead of campaigns. And within each listing are the keywords and ads. You have the same flexibility within Business.com as you have within Google and Yahoo; you can add keywords to your listing, edit your keywords, change their bids, write new ad texts, and pause under performing ad texts.
You can also set up conversion tracking within Business.com as well as Google Analytics. You can even set up destination URL’s for each keyword if needed. Reporting provided is more than necessary with status of your listing, CPC, position or rank as they call it, clicks, cost, total conversions, conversion rates, cost-per-conversion and conversion revenue. The one thing they don’t give you however is the impression count.
Your ad text or the actual listing in Business.com is slightly different from Google and Yahoo. Your listing title can include up to 60 characters and the description can contain up to 150 characters. You have your typical destination URL and a display URL. But then there is a multilink area where you can fill in separate page names and their URL’s. What this does is allow for more links to page of your site that you have listed directly under your main listing. This gives the user more flexibility and more of a chance that you’ll get a click to your site.
When it comes to reporting you can generate a traffic and lead report for any date range. You can view the report immediately and even export the data into Excel.
Last month for one of my clients I was able to generate a total of 19 leads at a cost of $26 per lead. My CPL goal was $55. The extra 19 leads helped me reach my monthly goal for total paid search leads at a super cheap cost. I could probably increase my keyword bids and get even more traffic which I plan to do here in August.
The point is as a PPC advertiser, we should be looking into all opportunities to increase leads and sales for our clients. If we’re only ever work in Google, Yahoo and MSN we’ll never know what kind of results we can receive from other search engines. If your client has it in their budget I would recommend giving Business.com a try!
