This is my experience with Exactseek. In July 2010 I purchased 5 keywords for $12 each for 3 months. I paid $60 for 3 months in total. (5 X $12) It seemed pretty cheap to me and my keywords were:
- web design
- website design
- web hosting
- cheap web hosting and
- search engine optimisation.
I sent traffic from the web design, website design and search engine optimisation keywords straight to my website www.webtechnologyqueensland.com and over 3 months had several hundred hits. I directed all the web design and website design traffic straight to my instant quote form. Presumably these people were wanting a website designed and so would want to know how much. In 3 months I had only a handful of those several hundred people fill out the quote form - and not a single sale resulted.
That was dissapointing. However my reasoning was that my website wasn’t optimised to convert leads. I thought “Exactseek are delivering qualified leads, but I’m just not converting them because my website isn’t built right.” However I realised this wasn’t true either.
For the other two keywords, web hosting and cheap web hosting, I sent all the traffic straight to www.ipage.com where I'm an affiliate. I earn $100 for every sale and thought if I could even get 1 sale in 3 months I would make my money back. Ipage is also a big web company with a lot of domains and hosting and a lot of experience at converting leads… so they don’t have any issue with knowing what to do with qualified leads.
Again however, after 3 months from those 2 keywords I had several hundred visitors to iPage... AND NOT A SINGLE SALE. No commission.
Exactseek also have a system where when you sign up for keywords – you subcribe. So after 3 months I was automatically charged via Paypal for another $60 for those keywords. So I did a little optimisation, made a few changes and watched again.
Once again after another 3 months – not a single sale or commission for all 5 keywords. This has led me to the conclusion that the traffic from Exactseek is not qualified leads. In fact I don’t know what kind of traffic it is at all. I even wondered in my mind if there was some kind of automated system to send traffic even though the software shows that all the traffic was from differing IP addresses.
If you try to cancel your subscription before the end of the 3 months you lose the remainder of your time – so set a reminder for yourself on your Calender and unsubscribe just before your 3 months is up.
In summary – I spent $120 on keyword advertising, and had a total of about 1100 clicks generated for a total return of $0. You can form your own conclusions from this, but in my opinion Exactseek Keyword Advertising doesn’t work and is not worth spending any money on at all. If you have an opinion, please comment.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
