Hi, I have been using goto.com pay-per-click for the past week. I used them a long time before, but I really didin't monitor what went on with them.

This time when I added money about a week ago the money was gone in about 2 or 3 days. That was not a big problem but I thought it was strange since in order for anyone to see my add they would have had to go 3 pages deep for the keyword web hosting, but with paying $25 to test I just passed it off as nothing. Well Last night around 10PM my time I went to add money on my account and also reduce my bids a little lower, goto.com forced me to add $50.27 instead of just $25 again. Well I paid them the money. When I woke up this morning about 7AM I check my email that stated that at 12:30 AM (3 hours later) my account had run out of money.

I think Goto.com is ripping people off because there is no way that if I'm have the 30 th or 40 place for bidding that I would run out of money that quick. I wanted to know if any one else has any horror storys about goto.com

Goto derives over 90% of its traffic from their affiliates sites and not the goto.com main site. This explains the volume of traffic they can push even through the lower level pages. They are not committing fraud in the strictest sense of the word, but they are implying their traffic is higher quality than it actually is.

All their affiliates are paid to perform searches, the average payout is around $0.04 per search. So if you look at the top bids under the key word "web hosting" at around $4.00 per click, they are doing pretty nicely out of the deal.

nope no rip off,
GOTO is pretty good for pay per click, don't put your listings on #1 because many people will just click on it for fun :)

Well, the sad thing is I didn't put it on the top. On some keyword searchs I put it in the 10th place if that. But others I just let it go to the 30th 40th place. I can't see how in 3 hours my account go drained. All the other pay per clicks that I use can take up to 24 to 48 hours to use up $25.

Goto is not a good place to advertise.
If you want to get your name out there then maybe top 10 is good. But if you are some where on the second page it's just not worth the money.

Directed traffic can be gathered from some other place.

boy am I learning that.

Goto is definately not the best place to advertise. I was like you. I use to spend over $200 a month in my advertising account. My ROI is less than a $100. So I stop advertising with them. What is happening at Goto is; most click your site receives are not from leads looking for hosting service. They are from the affiliates themselves. So you are not getting targeted leads as they claim.
Your best bet is to advertise on web host directories like:

Findhostonline.com (http://www.findhostonline.com)
Hostsearch.com (http://www.hostsearch.com)

There are many more out there.
Hosting directories do get targetted leads from different source saving you the headache of advertising.

mrnet

<<EDIT: Please list URLs in signature (see profile) and not within posts>>

I have ran ads on them. I didn't make much money off of them so I was trying some other avenues.

Actually, web hosting business is a very competitive business. Everyone can start a web hosting business. Your focus should be on customers acquization. If you run an ad say for $50, and you get 3 to 5 signup from that ad, it is worth it.
But the best advertisement you will ever get is from satisfied customers. They tell their friends, families, and co-worker. Most of our clients are from referrals from satisfied customers.
That is why you should focus on having a good if not excellent customers support.

Good luck

Most of our is as well.

goto.com is a good company. I have used them in the past for several differnt sites.

With the current competition and the number of bids on Goto.com I agree with mrnet, advertising on Web Hosting directories is the best way to promote your business...

not sure about Findhostonline.com doesn't look that professional...

Good luck

The advantage I see in advertising with findhostonline.com is that, it is a new web hosting directory. Not many advertising on it yet, so my banner ad has more chance to be seen now as oppose to when they started getting hundreds of adverising.
I agree with FindSP.Com, it doesn't look all that professional, but this is business. You are not looking for professionalism. You are looking for targetted hits to your site. Some web hosting directories look very professional but they cannot send leads to your site.
The only thing we sshould always do in advertising is we have to play around with different advertising methods or companies untill we find the right one for our business. What might be right for me might not be right for the next man, and vice versa.

Good luck to all

Hello
The only Web hosting directories worth advertising are those who themselves feature highly in search engine rankings for terms like "web hosting".
Especially if you are on a pay per impression arrangement.

From experience, we get very few referals from these directories through the normal listings so I am not sure if advertising is worth it.
I am sure that Hostsearch is charging about $700 per month for buttons which is unlikely to be recovered through sales.

I have come to the comclusion that the best ways are word of mouth, referal programmes and conventional search engines.
I got fed up trying to get decent listings in search engines so I decided to start paying.
I do that by buying very specific keywords on the pay per clicks who feed data into the search engines.
Here is a list of who feeds who:

Dogpile: Goto Top 10, Findwhat top 5
Metacrawler: Goto top 3, Findwhat top3
Altavista UK: GotoUK top 2
Excite UK: GotoUK top 2
Ask.co.uk: Espotting top 10, GotoUK top 10
Cnet.com: Findwhat top 3
Mamma.com: Findwhat top 3

there are loads of other relationships like this, but those were the ones I had to hand ona post it note.

If you are bidding for very specialist terms the price per click is very low and the return is really rather good.

Gordon

Gordon makes a good point. Using 'web hosting' as a keyword is going to cost a packet and put you way down the list. If you have a niche market you can exploited use keywords tha fix that market. You advertising is more focused then and will attract people to your site that are going to be more interested in the services you offer.

Try a few oddball words too if you have the money left over. People search for some odd things at times, and sometimes they're also looking for hosting.

Greg Moore

And don't forget common mis spellings and typos.
We get a lot of click throughs for web hsoting.

Gordon

I'm sorry, but I think GoTo is a complete rip-off. I know no one who'd use their search services.

Not just that, but they have a subsidiary search site (can't remember the name off-hand, when I find it I'll post it) which somehow makes itself your default search via IE, and it's a pain to remove. It did this to my boyfriend three times ... I thought maybe he was looking at smut sites, but then it happened to me a month ago -- and all I did was click on a GoTo link via Dogpile.

After that fiasco, I swore I'd never click on a Goto pay-per-click site again.

Originally posted by Abby
I'm sorry, but I think GoTo is a complete rip-off. I know no one who'd use their search services.

Not just that, but they have a subsidiary search site (can't remember the name off-hand, when I find it I'll post it) which somehow makes itself your default search via IE, and it's a pain to remove. It did this to my boyfriend three times ... I thought maybe he was looking at smut sites, but then it happened to me a month ago -- and all I did was click on a GoTo link via Dogpile.

After that fiasco, I swore I'd never click on a Goto pay-per-click site again.

Well, I think you have a confusion there, most people don't make the clicks on the Goto.com web site, but on their affiliated sites like AOL, there if you search for hosting and you're in the top 3 in goto.com your company appears on the first search result page.


But I don't think that the quality of the traffic is too good anyway...

Well, i don't use AOL's searches, but I've never had a problem with rankings there because of DMOZ -- for my own purposes, at least. Do they designate which sites are paid-clicks, like MSN? I avoid MSN's "featured sites."

BTW, the Go-To subsidiary that forces itself as IE's default search site is called Turbo Find or something.

Until Goto.com stops paying affiliate sites per search, it will not be an effective search engine for your money. We have averaged over 1600.00 a month there for 1-year and won't do it again.

We found there are a couple spider search engines that have incorporated goto.com search results, one in particular MEGASPIDER.COM will take more of your money then AOL hits will being in the top 3 positions at Goto! We found this hard to believe, especially since nobody we talked to even heard of that search engine nor used it yet they sent more traffic than AOL and the others combined. Sales did not reflect users coming from Megaspider, most sales came from AOL and others. There are many other issues we have logged and Goto just lets it continue.

I could go on and on with this, the bottom line, we have stopped using Goto.com completely and we're doing better now.