Over at Search Engine Watch Forums, a member asks about Ask.com’s Sponsored Listings and the quality of traffic coming from them.
Seems that results are ranging based upon quality of the keywords chosen and campaign targeting, here are some of the responses in the mix:
We get decent results from Ask. However, it takes some work. You need to carefully choose your keywords (and negatives, if you’re using broad match), and be ruthless about tracking and tweaking.
In defense of ASK.com I have received conversions from them.
Unfortunately, they were so negligible that the cost of the campaign was in the thousands of percent to the return. If we spent $1000 we sold $10 on a good run.
These were the exact same keywords used at Google and Yahoo too, so it’s a real apples to apples comparison. That is pretty tough to do considering their cpc is much lower.
What really bothered me though was that the reporting from different sources (tracking, analytics, logs, etc.) showed “no search term entered” on about 80-90% of the traffic. To me, nothing screams fraudulent clicks like that. Or it may be possible that they are using one of those “Proprietary technologies that integrates directly into the viewers browser”…
