Don’t forget about the Smaller Search Engines – 7Search

While the top three search engines account for over 90% of search traffic, there are hidden deals to be found on price per click hiding among the second tier search networks.

One such network is 7Search.  7Search provides advertising for a network of small websites and search engines like Mamma.com (the “Mother” of all search engines!).

The quality of clicks are often lower, but the discrepancy in cost per click on 7Search is usually greater than the discrepancy in click quality.  From personal experience, I saw a 3% conversion rate from 7Search on a page that typically had a 10% conversion rate.  However, the CPC, for keywords such as “las vegas,” on 7Search is only 9 cents for the top bid, while SpyFu puts that top bid at $3.81 on Google.

The keyword bids on 7Search are very transparent.  When searching for keywords to add, 7Search lists the top three bids for each keyword.

It is these features that set 7Search around from other second tier networks (and first tier networks, for that matter).  7Search does have more customization options than even Google.  You can customize specific landing pages and ad descriptions all within the same campaign, rather than creating multiple campaigns.  (Which, I guess, wouldn’t work very well on Google, because they have so much more traffic, but it is easily manageable on 7Search and more efficient than creating multiple campaigns, if you only want to make small changes on certain keywords.)

Some other networks to consider are:

• AOL – They are the #4 search engine with 3% of search traffic, according to Nielsen’s August 2009 rankings.

• Ask.com – The #5 search engine.

• Business.com – It’s a good network for business-to-business products.

• AdBrite

• Lycos

• Looksmart

• Excite

• All The Web

• Altavista

And one to watch out for:

• Kanoodle – You can’t find Kanoodle on the first page of Google for it’s own name search, but you can find many reports of click fraud.