ExactSeek, Worth Using For PPC?

October 12th, 2009 Add Your Comments

I’m still dabbling a small amount with PPC traffic, more for fun and kicks than anything else. You just never know when you’ll come across something really good so for the sake of a few dollars I don’t mind giving things a try. Latest up on my list of PPC traffic sources to try was ExactSeek, I seem to remember trying them ages ago but couldn’t remember how it went so I set up a new trial.

Anyway, ExactSeek offer a PPC model that’s not really PPC, instead you pay them $12 for 3 months to have an advert show for a given keyword. By not having to pay for each click they reckon that you should be getting a bargain. I thought it would be interesting to see just how this works out so I set up an experiment. I bought 2 adverts, one for a single keyword, the other for a longer search phrase. I wanted to find out just how much traffic ExactSeek would drive and more to the point, would the cost per click make it a worthwhile traffic source? Part of this experiment was also to see which model worked best with ExactSeek, does it pay to buy a very popular search phrase with loads of competition being rotated or does no competition longtail work better.

As a control I also bid in Adwords on the same searches and used the same adverts. This gave me a solid cost per click for each phrase so that I could see how ExactSeek compared. After 2 months I think I’ve got enough data and well….the results aren’t good for ExactSeek!

Single Word Clicks – 38
Long tail Phrase Clicks – 7

Cost Per Click For ExactSeek – $0.21 and $1.14
Cost Per Click For Adwords – $0.15 and $0.06

That’s over a 2 month period. Those same number of clicks average out in Adwords to only cost me $5.84 and $0.42 respectively (as opposed to $8 for each with ExactSeek). As for the quality of the traffic, I can’t really comment on that because none of the ExactSeek traffic converted (maybe that’s comment enough!) It does show that if you’re going to use ExactSeek it’s much better to pay the money for really popular high traffic single keywords even with the increased competition. Trying to be clever with longtails really is a no go.

So although there are some good sources of paid traffic out there I wouldn’t recommend ExactSeek as being one of them. Don’t be fooled by only paying $12 a quarter, you’d be much better of throwing that $12 in to Adwords even if its only for educational purposes. It’s widely accepted that you pay the higher prices on Adwords for higher quality traffic and that other sources should work out cheaper. As I’ve just proven with ExactSeek that’s not always the case and when it comes to learning with PPC there is nothing worse than paying over the odds for bad traffic.

One final thing to mention about advertising with ExactSeek is that they’ll put you on a 3 month subscription renewal with PayPal so if like me you find it not worth the money it’s up to you to cancel that subscription.

Paul B

4 Responses to “ExactSeek, Worth Using For PPC?”

Nick October 12, 2009

Useful information. Cheers Paul. I’ve tried a load of ‘cheap’ advertising options like this, including banner advertising on various networks, and none of them have given me the profitability that Adwords has. Mind you, I’ve used Bing in the past to some success, although they don’t get anywhere near the clicks that Adwords does.

I think MySpace advertising has just opened up to us marketers in the UK, so I think I’ll give that a try at some point.
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Art Lynch October 12, 2009

I tried Exactseek twice over a two year period in a fairly tight niche. I won’t try again (especially after your post). The traffic was lousy and no converts the first time. The second time the traffic was better but no converts.
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Stefan October 12, 2009

When it comes to buying traffic I personally believe Google AdWords is the best. Thanks to it you can be extremely narrow and make sure almost everyone who click on your link will end up buying your product.
Stefan´s last blog ..How to Automatically Back Up Your Computer
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Frank Lynch October 14, 2009

thanks paul, i too agree with you that no one can beat Ad-words, i have been using banner advertising since months and it did not gained me anything, also Keyword Plug-gin for word press can drive lots of traffic to our blog, what do you say ?
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