I tried Looksmart about 3-4 years ago and I was less then thrilled with the results. But I figured it has been a while so I would test them out again. I signed up for a bonus credit and tested them out with a trial campaign.

Well, it turns out they start to charge you automatically once your account balance drops below a certain threshold. So I was automatically charged $80+ before I had a chance to even test out the system properly. It’s a good thing I caught this in time, else they would have just kept charging my account. I looked at the stats and the quality of visits were the lowest of any source I had - lowest pageviews per visit by a decent margin. My stats also showed far less visits to my site from Looksmart’s network than they were showing me (and charging me for) in their control panel, so I’m a little baffled about the difference there.

Looksmart Pros:

• None I can think of

Looksmart Cons:

• They will drain your account if you don’t keep an eye on it.
• Quality of traffic was suspiciously bad.
• My site stats and Looksmart’s own traffic stats were very different.

During an episode of Shoemoney’s Webmaster Radio show, his guest Dillsmack talked about his experiences with Looksmart, where they charged $3,000 to his account while he was trying to redeem the FREE $150.00 worth of clicks before he realized what was going on. A call to Looksmart solved it in his case, but Shoemoney still gave out a warning about trying to redeem “free” credits.

I would not recommend Looksmart.

• PPC Network Overview
• Part 1: Google AdWords
• Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
• Part 3: MSN AdCenter
• Part 4: Looksmart
• Part 5: Adbrite

Update: You can now get a $50 Microsoft Adcenter promotional credit when you sign up.

MSN AdCenter was a bit late to the PPC game and had a lot of catching up to do. I think they rolled out a decent product and have a few features that set it apart, namely targeting. The biggest problem with them is market share.

MSN AdCenter Pros:

• They offer demographic targeting that allows you to specify spending increases depending on sex, age, income.
• Quality of traffic seems pretty high

MSN AdCenter Cons:

• Response times to stopping or pausing campaigns are notoriously bad.
• Pretty low volume of searches overall in their system

When I first started the campaign I was advertising women’s jewelry so I set “-man, -boy, -cheap, …” keywords as negatives right in the same list of keywords. Well, it turns out MSN has a negative keyword matching system that’s completely separate from the rest of the keyword system and they ignore any minus signs in the keyword list, taking the word as a keyword instead.

So over a course of about 4 days, I had jewelry ads running for “play boy” and “man love”. It was coincidentally during a weekend when they were upgrading their system so it was down all of that Saturday. So the time for me to notice this in the analytics, plus the time before I was able to login and correct this, plus the time it took for them to change it over (like I said - slow response times) - added up to about 4 days of really untargeted ads and wasted money.

• PPC Network Overview
• Part 1: Google AdWords
• Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
• Part 3: MSN AdCenter
• Part 4: Looksmart
• Part 5: Adbrite

NEW: Get a $25 credit when you sign up with Yahoo Search Marketing

Yahoo Search Marketing (or YSM, also formerly known as Overture) is a PPC network with a different structure than AdWords or AdCenter. It’s fairly difficult to make apples to apples comparisons between these services because of how each is structured. Each one of these programs have nuances that you have to get used to.

YSM is based more around keywords as opposed to Google’s Adwords (which is more centered around campaigns).

YSM Pros:

• Highest pageviews per visit of all the networks in my experience.
• Pretty decent volume of searches

YSM Cons:

• Interface can be fairly confusing, control panel is not laid out very intuitively.
• Have to prepay for your ads in set amounts and set a recurring pre-payment.
• Ads have to be reviewed before they are shown. This can take several days.

Overall, I think YSM is worth testing out, but I would read up on how to use the system and go through some tutorials before taking the plunge. I think it has a bit of a steeper learning curve than the other PPC networks. I see YSM being well suited for a company with a larger budget, especially one going after generic terms for branding purposes.

• PPC Network Overview
• Part 1: Google AdWords
• Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
• Part 3: MSN AdCenter
• Part 4: Looksmart
• Part 5: Adbrite

Google AdWords has probably been my favorite PPC network of all and I plan to continue spending most of my PPC advertising budget with them in the future.

AdWords Pros:

• Probably the best interface of the bunch, easiest to use.
• Delivers targeted traffic
• Delivers the most traffic. They have the best volume of search.
• You can have your ads running immediately

AdWords Cons:

• Can’t bid on trademarked terms
• Some keywords have pretty high minimum bids if you’re a new site due to their recent arbitrage crackdown.
• Need to watch content match results in certain sectors.

The last point deserves some clarification. I’ve run two different campaigns in two different industries. In industry #1 the pageviews per visitor coming from Adword’s content network (other people’s sites via AdSense) were significantly lower than from search and other comparable sources. In industry #2 the pageviews per visitor coming from the content network were higher than other sources. So it’s something you really should test - if you want to expand your reach that way. If the volume delivered through Google search is sufficient, then you might want to opt out of the content network entirely (which is enabled by default).

If you have never tried Adwords, check out the post on how to get $230 Free Adwords Credit.

• PPC Network Overview
• Part 1: Google AdWords
• Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
• Part 3: MSN AdCenter
• Part 4: Looksmart
• Part 5: Adbrite

I experimented with a number of different ad networks in the last few months including Google AdWords, YSM, MSN AdCenter, Looksmart, and Adbrite. AdWords has been my favorite and I was fairly satisfied with YSM and MSN AdCenter as well, but my experience with both Looksmart and Adbrite have been far less than stellar. In the following series I will go over my experiences with each network.

Do keep in mind that this is based on my own experiences and everything I say constitutes opinion based on these experiences.

• Part 1: Google AdWords
• Part 2: Yahoo Search Marketing
• Part 3: MSN AdCenter
• Part 4: Looksmart
• Part 5: Adbrite