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New PPC engines are coming online at a staggering rate. This is added to by the increasing list of well known crawler and directory based engines who are re-thinking their own models to include or even replace listings with PPC engine results. Further to this in the search for the best PPC to list with, we add questions on how to find and deal with regional based PPC engines covering, for example, the Australasian market.

The most radical change in the global market to date has been the recent shift of Looksmart to an entirely PPC based model for all listings. Overture may have once been the PPC engine of choice for anyone looking for substantially diverse traffic but with Google's Adwords and the increasing popularity of engines such as FindWhat, the decision is no longer an easy one.

Overture is increasingly moving out of the price range of SME's for highly relevant terms. A good example of this is the 'e-commerce' keyword in an Overture search which will cost the advertiser over USD$4 per click (at the time of writing this). Only large multi-nationals such as Verisign can compete in this bracket.

So what are the alternatives? Google Adwords are a new addition which can be targeted on not only specific keywords but also on the location and preferences of the user. This locality differential adds an inviting option for sites with tightly focused audiences.

The answer however could lie in the emerging PPC engines with expanding networks of affiliate sites. FindWhat, Sprinks, Kanoodle and Kanoodle's European sister site Espotting provide examples of this. These engines offer traffic at a lower cost to the better established engines, however there are drawbacks. The predominant drawback being the increased potential for fake traffic (affiliates sites clicking on their own links to earn money which comes off your account) with the increase in affiliate sites.

Finding the engine with the best reporting, support and traffic quality controls weighed against the actual PPC value of key terms is the challenge.

This year Sprinks launched a new reporting system and culled off a large number of their affiliates due to exactly this problem. Large numbers of fake clicks and a lack of good reporting was leading to substantial losses to clients. The results of these changes are still to come.

Where do you go from here? Test, test and test some more. Sampling the traffic from the respective PPC engines becomes the only option when dealing in such quickly changing circumstances. Having your hand in each cookie jar and spending some time putting together results from each one will give you the best returns. Using a scenario where exposure is increased or decreased each month depending on traffic and ROI from each PPC engine is actually an attainable result.

Most engines will allow accounts of around USD$50 as a starting point which should allow a test base for traffic through to your site. Although this may appear at first to take up a fair amount of valuable time, the benefits down the track will be worthwhile.

Gary Jensen
nzbase.com