As promised I am going to start sharing with you my direct experiences with the cash cow Pay Per Click companies.
The first one I am going to start with is Shopping.com
I started using Shopping.com back in early 2006 to list the products for sale on MoGiZ.com
I started the account with a small budget ($200) to see if they were worth using.
The first thing I noticed was that within 15 minutes of loading my products my entire budget was eaten up.
I was absolutely amazed that a site could plow through $200 worth of clicks in 15 minutes, I mean is it even possible for them to propagate to a comparison site and really be clicked on by real shoppers that quickly? I said “no way there has to be something wrong”, so I emailed shopping.com support and of course received an automated response message. Over the next few days I emailed them multiple more times and never did get a call back from a real support rep, so I took the liberty to file a chargeback through my credit card company and decided not to use them any longer.
Ok, so I am a sucker for punishment and decided to give shopping.com another try, so in August 2007 I built a new shopping feed, uploaded it to the shopping.com site and funded the account again. To my amazement again within moments the funds were depleted and my account was inactive. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
I ran a report to see if they really did send traffic to MoGiZ.com and what I found was that we didn’t have a single referral from them. I emailed support and told them to have someone contact me and again automated reply. I continued to send emails to support and continued to get automated replies and canned answers, so again I file a chargeback with my credit card company.
The shopping season rolls around and I get an email from shopping.com saying they have improved their site and added new features, so being the sucker I am, I decided why not give them one more try, maybe they have fixed their problems and really will send me good traffic. I created the feed, funded the account and to my surprise nothing had changed. My funds were eaten up almost instantly and the referrals from shopping.com were few.
I have decided to never use the shopping.com service again, obviously they have a problem with their system and don’t care enough about their customers to investigate and fix it.
I really think that PPC companies are all about siphoning your profits for their own gain; they could care less if you convert a referral to a sale, or if the referral is really truly an interested shopper. They are interested in blasting through your budget as quickly as possible to pad their own bottom line.
So I say “Product Marketer Beware!”
I also found another company with similar experiences, you can read his blog by clicking here: http://gothamjg.wordpress.com/
