Looking for Reviews on Ad Matching Company "Vertical Search Works"
-
Hey there,
We got cold called by "Vertical Search Works" - VerticalSearchWorks.com and while it sounds great (low CPC compared to our current PPC stuff) on great networks (DIY, HGTV), no contracts, pause anytime...
But RipOffReport has two bad reviews on them and I have not been able to search out anything else on them online. If anyone has insight before we start working with them, let me know!
Thanks!
-
Have you had any luck with other companies that are selling the same kind of service? It seems to me that reaching out to the companies that they put your ads on and just bypassing VSW would be a better option. I don't know if the pricing would be the same as what VSW offers but at least you would reduce the possibility of being scammed.
-
Hi Fancois, this comment above from (Feb 13) is older. Did you see my above comment from March 16th, 2012?
-
Hi Pashmina,
Was wondering the results of your test. Have recently interacted with VSW and not sure if it's even worth giving it a trial run. Their CPC is much higher than Adwords and I question their contextual targeting ability.
The account manager is nice, but a fast talker. He seems to be more accustomed to dealing with people that know nothing about SEM.
Any feedback you have would be welcomed!
-
That's a bummer, Pashmina!
I hate that argument that some of the advertisers are giving.
"Please spend $1k for a banner ad on our site."Sorry, we didn't get anything from it last time we tried.
"You were expecting CONVERSIONS!? You know, banner ads are really just a branding opportunity..."
Maybe for YOU, buddy...
-
Soooo... we ran our test with Vertical Search Works. Like Kristi's experience, we received traffic but the conversion rate was terrible, and well below par of our other paid advertising campaigns.
While I think their account service people were very nice, I did get into a bit of a healthy discussion (argument) with one of their Sales dudes about the "value" of their service and product.
This guy spent a good 15 minutes trying to convince me that the value shouldn't be measured in just conversions, but also in the 2 million plus impressions the ads received. I shot back and said that aside from lack of conversions which was obviously a driving force for an e-commerce client, site engagement in way of bounce rate, time on site, and page views were also below par. I also said impressions was a weak argument and a point with no merit given the client's goals (MORE SALES). This discussion then devolved into him defending the efficacy of their ad program, with me making funny faces as I listened (which thankfully he could not see).
Look, VSW sales dude: performance of your ads sucked. Plain and simple. I was both a little amused and a little annoyed that this guy was trying to convince me I was wrong.
Anyone care to agree, (laugh with me), or play devil's advocate?
-
Interesting. Okay we're are planning to run a test for one of our clients too. I'll post back in a couple months if we see any results. Thanks for the quick reply.
-
Hi Pashmina,
They were very nice but we didn't receive any conversions for what we spent. We spent about $500 and got some traffic from some high profile sites but nothing happened. I think some of it came from recipes which was not supposed to happen.
We did not have the budget to continue to test further.
-
Kristi, Did you ever go for the program with Vertical Search and how did it turn out?
-
Thanks David
-
Can't tell you about them - but i will say that cpc isn't as important as what type of quality visitor they send ie bounce rate , time on site , conv rate etc
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Competitor bidding on our company name
Hi,
Paid Search Marketing | | ChrisHolgate
I'll keep this one short and sweet! We've noticed just recently that a number of competitors are bidding on our company name, clearly with the intention of being listed above our organic result. I'm certain that Google used to allow us to bid on our own company name for a negligible amount but now it looks like we're going to have to chase £1 odd per click to obtain customers who are actively searching for us. Can anything be done about this or is it now nature of the beast that we're going to have to have a price war on bidding on our own company name? Thanks for your help! Chris1 -
When to switch off AdWords ads in your channel mix?
My question is actually Inspired by that very good article: https://moz.com/blog/google-organic-clicks-shifting-to-paid that I read this morning. Present situation: For a specific and valuable non-branded keyword combination (2-3 words) we rank: Google Adwords: position 1 Local Pack (with maps): position 1 Organic Search: position 3-5, lately more 5-6 Question?: Is it still worth having AdWords ads or not there? How to evaluate if we could do without AdWords? Any algorithm, experiment, thought that would help find out? We know our average cost per lead for the different channels. Just to leave away AdWords ads for a certain time is not really an option nor would that statistically mean anything, i.e. if we skip AdWords and have the same number of leads after that and compare it with the months before (with AdWords) that could also be due to other reasons (seasonal aspects, etc.). Put in other words: if we skip AdWords people would still click (more) on our other two search results (local & organic). I am not sure if the additional leads coming from AdWords outweigh the cost we have for that. Would love to know your thoughts about that. Thanks a lot for your input in advance. Cheers, Cesare
Paid Search Marketing | | Cesare.Marchetti0 -
Adwords Ad disapproved - Banned product on Site (glutamine)?
We are starting to get ads disapproved. One yesterday, one today. The reason - banned supplement 'glutamine'. Neither of these ads were for glutamine so I assume it's because l-glutamine is sold on the site. The actual ad for l-glutamine landing on the l-glutamine page has not been disapproved? In 2012 Google informed us the glutamine was no longer on the banned list so I'm not sure what's going on here? Has anyone had a similar experience? Is there a solution apart from removing the product entirely?
Paid Search Marketing | | jbk3650 -
How do companies protect against Adword sabotage?
What's to stop a company from buying a service to click on competitors' adwords thereby frivolously spending companies' ad budgets?
Paid Search Marketing | | Edward_Sturm0 -
How to improve the Search Lost IS (rank) & Search Impr. share ?
Hi guys, I have PPC campaign that gets more or less good results I noticed that i have high percentage of: Search Lost IS (rank) & Search Impr. share, although
Paid Search Marketing | | EdmondHong87
that my quality score is high (6-8) and the average position also very high (1.5-2.5). What can i do to decrees these numbers ? Ohh and also the bids are more than the top page number... Any help are welcome!0 -
How Do You Remove the "Google Site Stats" Tag from a Conversion Page
Our company does not want it up there. Is there a way to remove it without have to change the conversion tracking code? It's quite a pain given our internal processes to overhaul many conversion codes. Is there an easy way to do this so that we can simply remove the tag?
Paid Search Marketing | | CSawatzky0 -
Facebook ads to people who like a particular brand or page
Can I target my facebook adds to only those users who like a brand or page? I have an exhibition coming up next year and would like to target those who like the brand page. I know I can target on interests etc but cannot see how I can target a particular page. Any advice greatly appreciated as I am sure others would be interested if this can be done. ThanksJames
Paid Search Marketing | | tempowebdesign0 -
Adwords Product Listing Ads & Google Analytics mis-reporting
I hope you're sitting comfortably, this could be a long one and loaded with questions! Cut to the chase: Why is traffic from google product ads showing as 'organic' traffic in GA? Here's the scenario: Google Shopping I have thousands of products in a feed to google shopping (froogle, google base, google merchant, whatever you like to call it, I'll settle for google shopping for the purpose of this question). The URLs of this feed is tagged with GA tracking data (notably utm_source=GoogleBase&utm_medium=Product-Search), I have also tagged this with internal tracking which comes through in the back-end to assign orders to that specific source. In this case 'GOOGLEBASE'. Adwords Product Listing Ads As you know, a new (ish) feature of adwords pulls in your products from google shopping so that you get a richer ad (image, title, price) and displays this in the 'advert section' of the SERP. Once setting up a few of these, I noticed I was getting a fair amount of traffic for these new ads, taking one example, which resided in a relatively specific ad group (advertising Aviation Snips). Naturally, I wanted to find out which keywords were driving that traffic in order to improve the ads, or kill them if they weren't working. What was interesting is that I can't find anything about that traffic anywhere in adwords or google analytics. 254 clicks to 'aviation snips' must show up somewhere in analytics, if not the keywords, then what about the product? Analytics is showing nothing like that quantity of visits to those product landing pages where you'd expect. It's like ghost traffic. Google Analytics Since experimenting with product listing ads the organic traffic in GA has suddenly shot up, looking at the new keywords they are all queries which when I test them show up product listing ads in the SERP so it's obviously the paid listing ads driving this traffic. Why is google reporting these as organic, rather than paid? I also noticed a keyword appear as * in the PAID segment of analytics. I thought this was my missing aviation snips traffic, but digging into the landing pages for the * keyword, they are many different ones. There's a connection between the * and product listing ads, but what is it? Is the traffic being doubly reported? Back End Meanwhile we've seen an increase for orders tagged in the back-end of GOOGLEBASE which makes sense - google are pulling in my google shopping feed into the paid part of the SERPs and these are generating sales. Here are some of my initial thoughts / theories: 1. When google pulls in google shopping results into the organic part of the SERP, these get reported as ORGANIC in google analytics, even if you've tagged them otherwise. It seems they strip the tags out. This makes it very difficult to know if your google shopping feed is working well, or if you are doing well on standard organic traffic. 2. Google isn't separating out traffic as PAID with their new product listing ads, completely skewing the reports. It makes it look like you've gained great natural organic listings when if fact you are paying. 3. With relation to the missing Aviation Snips data - maybe google is showing a huge variety of products for that adgroup (even though it's specific) and therefore I can't see the traffic to the specific products that you'd expect. This I'm most confused about and wondered if I've missed a trick in setting the product listing ads up? I've attached a couple of screenshots which I hope will help clarify some of this. I can see product listing ads being great if you could get proper data to analyse and improve them. So here are my questions again if anyone can help? How do I see which keywords are driving the product listing ads? How do I see the landing pages for the product listings ads? What is the * keyword coming through in GA? How can you get GA to report product listing ads as paid rather than organic? Thank you so much. If I can gather enough data on this all and work it out I'll try to write up in a blog post to help others. 0rOMM.png GUAE0.png fWPL7.png
Paid Search Marketing | | ewanr0