The first moves are being made in the divorce of LookSmart from MSN, and LookSmart's quest for their new PPC future.
Anyone who has submitted to LookSmart over the past month has watched the submission process slowly but continuously evolving. Yesterday, I saw that the final pieces are in place to make LookSmart a purely PPC search engine.
A LookSmart submission now follows much the same process initially, but there are a few notable differences:
1. Keywords. LookSmart used to allow you to enter 10 keywords/phrases that you wished to target. Now they just give a text area, and tell you to enter each keyword/phrase on a different line. No limit is specified.
2. Cost per click. LookSmart used to have a flat fee cost of $0.15 CPC for any and all keywords. This is no longer true. LookSmart now defaults your bid to $0.20 CPC, however, some keywords are given a higher bid. Based on your bid, LookSmart will let you know what your expected ranking will be for the keywords you are given, and will let you know which terms will require a higher bid in order for you to be ranked at all.
3. Monthly budget. When LookSmart first initiated the flat fee CPC, they gave a default minimum monthly budget of $15.00. A few months ago, they removed the default, but allowed you to keep that $15.00 as your budget if you wished. Now, although this is technically still true, LookSmart will raise that minimum depending on how many listings you request and how valuable those keywords are.
Why I don't like the new LookSmart system:
1. Those keywords! Although LookSmart sets no limit on how many keywords you can enter, they truncate it back down to 10 total. I've tried entering just 2 or 3, I've tried entering 20. They return 2 or 3, or 10 -- and those are selected apparently at random. LookSmart returns a list that doesn't always include my top keywords (listed first), and breaks up some phrases into individual terms. For example "internet marketing" was broken into "internet" and "marketing", giving me listings for 2 untargeted and virtually useless keywords instead of the single target phrase. They gave me one keyword (promotion) that I hadn't even listed! In SEO everyone knows that you "suggest" keywords and hope for the best; the whole point of PPC is that you get the listings you pay for, under the search terms you specify. This new LookSmart system is the worst of both worlds.
2. The bidding. They set a default of $0.20 CPC, THEN tell you that you must bid more for some of your terms, and let you know what the minimum bid is. This adds a step, and it's annoying. Ydon't know, until after you've entered your minimum bid, what position you will get for that price. To rank #1, you might have to bid higher, adding yet another step. Although they claim that rank and cost are based on click-throughs, there is no way to find out what they are actually showing for click-throughs. You have to trust them. Overture's system is vastly superior, allowing you to see exactly what the top bids are for your chosen search terms, and allowing you to find out how many people searched for that term in the past month. This is a much sounder basis for budgeting.
3. The monthly budget. I have not yet succeeded in getting a monthly budget below $100.00 for any terms worth having, even when I lowballed and only asked for 2 keywords. LookSmart won't even let you create the account unless you guarantee to keep at least their minimum budget in it (the lowest I've gotten so far is $115.00) each month. They do not specify what they will do if you don't spend that much, but the implication is that they will give you the clicks to burn the budget, whether you want them or not -- I base this on the random selection of keywords and CPC's above. Overture, by contrast, charges an initial set-up fee, after which you're on your own. Put in $2.00, put in $2000.00, they don't care, they'll send you traffic to your chosen terms, until your money runs out, and then it stops. Clear, simple, reasonable.
As far as I can see, there is little or no incentive to use LookSmart in its current incarnation. You are paying a randomly determined amount, for randomly determined keywords, to get uncertain listings on lower-tier search engines. The submission process is uninformative and frustrating. I can hardly believe that just a couple of years ago, LookSmart was one of the best bargains in SEO, and one of the smartest advertising moves you could make. A one-time fee got you listed for appropriate keywords on search engines that included MSN. How did they take something so good, and turn it into something so bad?
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