Ah-ha marketing push?

[donNSIP]

Our company just received an unsolicited marketing package from ah-ha -- it included a good-quality polo shirt with "ah-ha" branding on the breast-pocket position, mini-CD, custom die-cut folder with 6 collateral sheets and cover letter. Needless to say, we were amazed. We spend a lot of clients' money on Overture, and we've never received anything besides postcards and emails.

Has anyone else received this marketing blast? Any comments on how useful ah-ha is at present? We don't use them, but are interested in recent users' results.

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums Don! :hi:

Many have received the same thing. This can indicate a "last stand" thing and a "one last push" to do start doing something.

They are a third tier PPC and will always be that. We have the first tiers of Overture and Google. 2nd tier of Looksmart(bordering on 3rd),

and many thousands of ppc so-called sites that are 3rd.

[Dan0]

Overture and Google obviously don't feel like they need to get your attention, Don. Ah-ha may be making money on this marketing campaign. It's been going for a while now. Surely long enough to be past the testing stages.

I've spent all the money I'm ever going to on 3rd-tier PPCs. Ah-ha isn't out ripping people off like some of them, but when you look at what you get for your dollar, it isn't the same thing you get with Google and Overture. With these two, you know that your listing is only going to appear in search results.

Looksmart and these others always have some way of charging you for a click when the person "clicking" doesn't know where they're going. Sometimes it's a text link that says "books" on a website about gardening. You think you're going to see a page from that site about gardening books, but instead you land at some dumb bookstore's website.

from ah-ha's site
TopLinks™ are branded listings located throughout your site. TopLinks™ pulls the most popular advertisers (based on the content of each page) and displays them in an advertisement form. Whether you need pop-ups, pop unders, sidebars, banners, or button/text links, the TopLinks™ Program caters to you.
In other words, it's all about getting the click by whatever means necessary. Not about driving quality for their advertisers. Just getting the click.

[1Lit.com]

"2nd tier of Looksmart(bordering on 3rd)"

Not all of us can afford the likes of Overture when the minimum listing fee is 10 cents per click.

Looksmart is 15 cents, Business.com 40 cents MINIMUM.

Apart from FindWhat, is there any other decent second or third ranking PPCSE which charges less than 10 cents a click minimum? I hate Sprinks control panel and dumped 'em.

Obviously a 2nd/3rd ranking search engine will not provide the kind of traffic that Overture can, but we don't mind that, as long as our listings are not subject to fraud or being listed, as has been discussed above, in dubious forms.

Thanks for the advice.

[Dan0]

Google's minimum is only a nickel.

Beyond the "big" PPCs, you're looking at traffic that might cost half as much, but it's worth far less than half as much. Give me a 10-cent click from Overture that gets me a subscriber, over a 1-cent click from Findwhat where they don't even stay long enough to load the page.

[ihelpyou]

No there is not. Whenever you have PPC, you have fraud. It just depends on how much fraud you want to take on? The smaller ppc's with ALL their affiliate sites constantly clicking on your listing just to make a buck is fraud.

So you either pay the 10 cents at Google or Overture and know the quality of clicks, or you pay the 1 or 5 cents elsewhere and have NO clue as to who may be clicking and on what term. It's your choice.

Actually, there really is not a good choice when talking PPC.