Espotting - a potted overview

[Black_Knight]

Espotting.com are the main European rival to Overture, and across Europe as a whole are currently larger than Overture.

If you understand Overture, then you understand Espotting - the models are essentially the same. The editorial/advertising policies are likewise almost identical to the overture policies.

Espotting has some of the better partnerships in Europe right now, including Yahoo!, so ignoring them is a mistake.

One great feature of Espotting is that you can assign multiple search terms to a single listing - meaning that a single title, description and URL can simply be given multiple search terms to apply to. This is of course a highly useful development and one I only wish Overture had followed.

Because Espotting has a slightly lower profile than Overture generally, you'll often find that competition for a given search term is a little less fierce, and thus the top bids can be lower on Espotting than on Overture UK.

[highman]

mmm.... a warning re espotting, for several reasons we used their '****' service and let them run the campaign..... big mistake, they burned our cash within 12 days, the brief was a 30 day campaign. Sure we got the traffic, but we were after the exposure 'length', so if you go down the espotting route 'do it yourself' and keep a keen eye on things..... luckily our Yahoo listing came into play earlier than expected and so we dropped espotting pronto!

espotting have their place, for us its a stop gap until the real SEO kicks in.

Just a little warning!

[Black_Knight]

I *always* manage my own campaigns, and those of my clients, personally. Hell, I'm the SEO - if the Espotting editors knew how to manage an account even half as well as I do I'd be out of a job - I'd resign. :)

[highman]

Agreed, the warning is about using the espotting *services*

[searchenginemarketing4u]

Has anyone noticed in increase in traffic in the last two weeks?

[redlion]

Another thing with Espotting is you can bid on singlulars (new computer) and plurals (new computers) separately. Can be nice bid differences!

And I agree with Black Kight - manage our own bids!

No big traffic increases for me - are you still seeing it or is it only one or two terms?

[MakeMeTop]

Watch out for crappy affiliates - they don't have as many as they used to, but they still have them.

Searchengine.com is the worst (it used to be searchuk), although they have recently cleaned up their act a little I still have on file their automated fraudulent click campaigns run by software. Espotting did give a refund on this when pointed out, I hasten to add - but most won't notice it!