Conversion

Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Alternative PPC Venues

In the world of pay-per-click advertising, there are three well-known players: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. However, there are several other interesting pay-per-click sites you may not be familiar with, which you might find useful.

Clickriver

Clickriver.com is owned and operated by Amazon.com. All ads are circulated on Amazon, and advertisers running ads through Clickriver are therefore able to reach an audience that is looking to shop online.

The pay-per-click interface is very intuitive and should seem familiar to anybody using Google, Yahoo! or MSN. Additionally, you have complete budget flexibility and easy-to-understand reporting, but no internal conversion tracking is provided (you’ll need to use a third-party solution to track results, such as Google Analytics). Clickriver could be an interesting test for your ecommerce website. No set up fee is required to sign up.

Business.com

Don’t let the name throw you off. It seems as if Business.com would be strictly for business owners, but it has attracted thousands of consumers looking for businesses that sell products or offer services. Additionally, Business.com has recently rolled out an interesting filter search that allows an advertiser to deliver ads to the users looking for specific products.

Its interface is based on categories and keywords, making the initial set up a bit tricky. And it doesn’t provide any internal conversion tracking, but does offer very flexible budget controls (daily budget cap, monthly budget cap, total budget cap). This could be an interesting test for service-based businesses.

Facebook

The famous social network has recently released its own pay-per-click program with cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing structures. The beauty of advertising on a social network is being able to select specific target demographics. If you have no idea who your target demographics are, you can use Facebook to figure out an audience that is most likely to click on your ads.

Facebook’s interface is intuitive and easy to understand. Reporting includes demographic data, clicks, ad performance and trends. No internal conversion tracking is available. It could be a great traffic channel for an ecommerce business.

Greg Laptevsky
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