Top 5 Pay Per Click Search Engines

In October 2003, Google acquired the Sprinks pay per click search engine, which powered About.com. As a result, Sprinks was put into retirement and About.com's text links are now powered by Google AdWords.

Initially pay per click search engines started life as individual search engines. Soon they began expanding their reach by paying websites for referring search traffic, but the growth was slow and somewhat limited.

They quickly realized that to reach critical mass, they needed to harvest the huge volumes of traffic that the most popular sites attracted; namely search engines, web directories and web portals. They achieved this through revenue sharing listing partnerships.

Pay Per Click search engines offer a number of features that standard search engines do not offer:

• Guaranteed top positions - typically before the main search results - in major search engines, web portals and metacrawlers.
• Keyword targeted listings - your listings will only appear in search results for keyword phrases you have selected. This allows you to extend or narrow your targeted audience as you see fit.
• Pay only for click throughs - you only pay for visitors - not impressions - who come to your site by clicking on your ad.
• Cost control - you determine how much you want to bid for each keyword phrase. Typically the higher you bid, the higher your listing appears in the search results. This allows for better tracking of your advertising costs and return on investment.

The top 5 pay per click search engines are:

1. Overture
2. Google AdWords
3. FindWhat
4. Espotting
5. Enhance Interactive (Formerly Ah-Ha)

Let's take a look at each on in more detail.

Overture

Overture is the leading pay per click search engine delivering 2.2 billion click throughs in 2002. Overture supplies results to many of the top search engines and web directories, including Yahoo!, MSN, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Lycos, and InfoSpace.

Overture has existing marketplaces in the Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US.

Overture can deliver a high volume of visitors, so be careful of bidding too much for a visitor. I have seen people spend thousands of dollars in a few days, without getting much in return. It is a painful lesson to learn.

Overture Information