Christian Little

Today is an important day – I’m going to teach you a nifty little traffic secret! But in order for me to do it, you need to take a small leap of faith and believe me when I tell you that Google is not the end all and be all of web traffic. I know this may come as a major shock to some of you, but try to put your fears aside from a few moments and read on.

The Search Market

First off all, you need to understand the size of the search market. There’s 5 main players in the organic search field: Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask, and AOL. At any given time, Google has about 60-70% of the market share of organic search depending on who you talk to (see Related Links at the end of this post).

That leaves the other four major players to fight over the remaining 30-40%. That’s not a small amount!

So what you need to realize here is that if 100,000 people are searching for your keyword every month, then chances are 10,000 other people are searching for the exact same thing on Yahoo.

And what the real kick here is this – there are hundreds of decent quality sources for search traffic. Just because Google is the biggest source doesn’t mean you have to focus on it.

Let’s take some examples…

I am bidding for “widgets” on Google Adwords and I’m paying $8.00/click every time somebody clicks on my advertisement. Let’s say I have a $500/month budget for advertising – with Google I can expect to get about 60 clicks.

Now let’s say I head over to Yahoo and do the same, but I find out I can pay $6/click – I can get almost 100 clicks for the same price as 60 on Google.

But let’s take this a step further, there are dozens of smaller search engines (Ask, 7search, etc) that are WAY cheaper than this. You can get clicks for $2-3 for the exact same terms – making it possible to get 200+ clicks for the same amount of money.

Common Misconception: Lower Cost = Lower Quality

Wrong! Just because you are able to advertise cheaper elsewhere doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not as high quality as Google’s traffic. Now I’m not saying all the smaller engines are high quality traffic sources, but you have a lot more margin for error on them. Furthermore, if you take the time to run properly A/B split testing and/or multi-variant testing you can optimize these traffic sources and make them very worth while.

I had a client last year that did this, they tried using Google and Yahoo PPC campaigns but they were paying almost $11.00/click on both and those were for highly optimized campaigns with high quality scores. Other people in the same market were paying $15.00/click on average. So we took their $10,000 monthly budget and shifted it over to the smaller engines.

The result?

We took their site from 1,000 ad clicks/month to over 8,000 clicks. This alone brought a massive surge in sales for them (they jumped to over 350% in revenue compared to the previous setup). That massive surge in revenue gave them the capital to put back into their traditional Google and Yahoo campaigns.

Now I’m not saying that will work precisely for you, but it is one story of many people in the past I’ve helped do this with and the results are simply amazing.

Common Misconception: Smaller Engines are Full of Click Fraud

Wrong! While you will encounter click fraud more frequently, it doesn’t really affect you overall. Let’s say you bought 5,000 clicks – you can probably expect about 500 of which will be fraudulent (which is steep I do admit), but when you compare it to Google – you would only get 1,000 legitimate clicks instead of the 4,500 legitimate ones you got on the new campaign, so it still works out in your favor.

But I Want to Advertise Where I’ll Get the Most Exposure!

This is true for every marketer, and that’s your goal. But you have to think logically – you can’t just put all of your cash into a very small ad campaign and expect magic to happen. Working with smaller engines that can send you a much large volume of traffic for the same cost is the better way to get started, then once you have established yourself and have more money coming in you go bigger.

Alright, Alright! But I Don’t Know Who the Smaller Search Engines Are!

No problem, here’s two that I highly recommend you get started with:

DogPile is a cute little search engine that has been around about as long as Google has, but for some reason they just never took off. Probably because the lack of publicity, they never really did any kind of advertising. But they are a sturdy little engine and worth looking at. Besides – who can say no when they’ve got that cute little animation of a puppy on their homepage?

Website: DogPile.com

7search is a cool search engine in it’s own way – it’s one of the few search engines that let’s you bid on more explicit search terms (so a lot of pharmacies, xxx websites, alcohol, and various other ‘grey area’ companies advertise on). That doesn’t make them any less useful, in fact it’s quite handy as they have a reputation for this so you’ve got a whole different visitor profile when you buy advertising with these folks (and diversity is a good thing to have).

Website: 7search.com

Other Search Engines to Consider

• Ask.com
• Hotbot

Related Links

1. Google’s Search Share – 70% – Information Week
2. Google Takes 70% of the Market – Law Librarian Blog