Google Adwords currently leads
content-sensitive web-based marketing solution for internet
advertizers. By participating in the Google AdWords program
advertizers can have their text, image and video based ads shown
on selected publishers sites that include Google AdWords JavaScript code. Google's servers show context sensitive
advertisements (Google Adwords). However, a number of
excellent alternatives exist, for example, the left hand side of
this page shows a
Clicksor skyscraper displaying
a text or image ad just like Google Adwords.
However, Google's
popularity also means that it is not necessarily the best
solution for most small advertisers. Many small businesses are
struggling to obtain effective internet advertizing through the
Adwords program. They find that the bid prices (or Cost per
Click) on Adwords can be prohibitively high. This makes
advertizing campaigns extremely expensive and of limited
effectiveness. Hence a number of competing alternative programs
exist that offer much better value for money than Adwords. By
using these programs in place of Adwords advertisers can
significantly increase traffic to their websites for a lot less
money.
In addition to the cost Google Adwords has
very stringent terms and conditions are that mean that many
would be advertisers are turned away. If you are not
satisfied with your Google Adwords experience or are looking for
more cost effective alternatives then take a look at these Top 10 alternatives to Google's Adwords
program that are ideal
for the small time advertiser and business.
Is Adwords ineffective and costing you too
much? Then try these
top 10 alternatives.
AdBrite
is the clear leader of the adwords alternatives for small
time advertizers.
As an advertiser you can use
AdBrite to set your own ad rates
and instantly reach over 370 million visitors on more than 80,000 sites all with
a single campaign buy. AdBrite's market share is growing all the time.
Publishers just place a small snippet of HTML
placed on their site, while
AdBrite handles serving, scheduling, billing, customer service,
and sales. About half of AdBrite's sales are generated from their marketplace and
sales team, while the other half are generated from users clicking "Your Ad
Here" on our publisher's sites. The best thing about AdBrite is that you can
reach a very large number of potential customers for
significantly less than you would have to pay with AdWords.
While
AdBrite can provide
advertisers with better ads and formats, more exposure and
better conversion rates for less money than
traditional ad networks such as Google AdSense their approach works fine along-side them as
a simple way to increase your campaign exposure. Additionally as an advertiser
you can purchase ads directly on sites showing AdBrite ads
for very cost effective rates -- something the other ad systems don't
typically do.
AdBrite doesn't
show the big "brick" of ads that you're normally used to but
rather
AdBrite gives
advertisers full control over the look and feel of their ads so AdBrite
campaigns can stand out on any website.
There is no obligation to purchase when
you can sign up and you can play with all of their tools and
experiment before purchasing any ads.
Click here to sign up.
Clicksor is one of the major leaders in the field providing
CPC and CPM advertizing solutions that are similar to Adwords but much cheaper
and more effective for small businesses. They offer a huge range of advertizing
formats including all of the standard Adwords formats as well as some very
effective alternatives such as pop under and interstitial ads.
Clicksor also
lets you sign up for both an advertiser and a publisher account and then freely
transfer your publishing income to your advertizing account in order to reduce
your advertizing costs.
One of the great things about
Clicksor is
that they have a large network of high quality publishers
while still offering bid prices that are significantly lower
than equivalent keywords on Adwords. They are also, in my experience, much more tollerant
than Google. Clicksor also supports showing ads as Google public service ad
alternatives so you can still access Google Adsense
publisher sites and traffic but for significantly less
money.
Clicksor also has a big advantage over a
number of the lower ranked alternatives on this site in that
their ads are truly context sensitive. Thus as an advertiser
you can be sure that your ads show only on relevant sites so
maximizing your click to customer conversion ratio. This means
that
visitors to websites showing ads are exposed to ads of the same subject as they were
searching for when they reached the site. This means the
effectiveness of your ads is maximized.
Clicksor allows you to start advertising from just 0.3c per click.
Significantly cheaper than the 5c minimum demanded by Adwords.
The ad creation and campaign control tools provided by
Clicksor are not perfect but they
are more than enough for you to perfect your ads and keep track of all of your
campaigns and expenditure.
Bidvertiser can be a
much more cost effective and useful alternative to
Google Adwords.
BidVertiser offers some intriguing ad formats including
what they refer to as free design. This lets you specify
the look and dimensions of your text ads and as an
advertiser means that you can design ads that will stand out
from the crowd and so maximize your conversion ratio and
reduce your advertising costs on unrelated clicks. While a useful
feature I have not investigated how well it works but
imagine that while it sounds good on paper it could be
difficult to setup. However, the custom nature of it means
that it probably results in lower priced ads which makes it
much more cost effective for you as an advertiser.
Another great thing about
BidVertiser is that you can use it to drive
customers to your eBay listings. Hence if you are a
major user of eBay for your business then
Bidvertiser may be the perfect solution for
directing customers searching for related items to your
eBay listings. Once you select your eBay item the ad is
created for you automatically with the minimum amount of
effort.
BidVertiser includes a complex fraud-detection
system that protects its customers from click fraud,
ensuring that only valid and legit clicks are counted.
Each click is processed online by their fraud-detection
system, using a sophisticated algorithm that is being
constantly updated by the fraud-detection team.
A relative newcomer to the scene
Infolinks specializes in In-Text Advertizing. That is it
indexes pages looking for keywords and phrases that are
not currently links and converts them into advertizing
links. As an advertiser this means that you can use
Infolinks to show ads that look like links on a publishers
site. When someone clicks on a link the ad is shown and they
are redirected to your site. In this way you can attract
users to your site without them necessarily realizing they
are visiting an ad. This leads to higher click thru rates
and higher conversion rates than the traditional banner and
skyscraper ads. The nice part is that
Infolinks compliments existing advertizing campaigns and
many publishers run it alongside other ad providers. This
means that as a publisher you can often advertise cheaply on
sites that would otherwise be very expensive for traditional
banner ads.
Infolinks claims to be leading the industry with the
most relevant in-text advertising links guaranteed. I am not sure how they
'guarantee' this but having used them for several months I
can attest that their keyword engine is very good and they
produce very relevant links compared to
other In-Text advertizing options.
The unobtrusiveness
of this ad style also makes it more attractive to your
audience since they are not continuously annoyed by flashing
banners and pop ups and instead visit your site in a more
engaged fashion.
Exit Junction
is a new affiliate program that was spun
off from Revenue Pilot which is now defunct. Exit
Junction is not strictly an adsense alternative but
instead is an excellent addition to adsense and other
context sensitive advertising programs. The key aspect
of
Exit Junction
that makes it a unique new way to advertise and drive
traffic to your site is that their
approach is capture exit traffic from a site. The way
this works is as follows: Suppose a user runs a Google
search and a website you are advertising on scores
highly for that keyword. To have your link appear as a
sponsored link for this keyword on Google would be
expensive. However, consider that the user then goes to
the first site returned by Google and that site is
running the
Exit Junction
code. At first nothing happens, the page loads and the
user sees the page as normal. However say they now found
that this site was not what they were looking for and
they hit the back button in their browser. This is where
Exit Junction
cuts in and provides unique advertising opportunities.
Instead of returning to the Google search
Exit Junction
intercepts the back command and instead shows a series
of sponsored links that match the original Google search
term.
The neat feature of
Exit Junction
is that at present it is novel and hence the user, who was
not expecting the back button to show them an ad instead of
their original search page will be more likely to notice the
ad and use it to visit your site.
Exit Junction
is therefore an ideal way to complement your existing
advertising efforts and will likely generate some very high
conversion rates.
Chitika - The Leader in Impulse Merchandising Chitika (pronounced
CHIH-tih-ka) is different to most other internet advertizing
companies and presents an intriguing alternative to Adwords.
Founded in 2003 Chitika is the industry leader in impulse
merchandising.
Chitika supports innovative publisher-side
advertising and merchandising solutions and services that
will help you maximize your advertizing campaign and attain
the highest possible conversion ratios.
The key to
Chitika being a successful Adwords
alternative is that instead of standing alone as a single
advertising solution
Chitika provides a way to compliment
your existing advertising campaigns by featuring your
products for sale directly through their advertisements.
They provide Ad Units which are very different from the
standard pop-unders and ad boxes that everybody else
provides. The key difference is that instead of displaying
the
'industry standard' advert boxes with image, video and text
Chitika provides active boxes
that show targeted products from your advertising
campaigns. As an advertiser you only pay for the click thru
on the ad is someone actually purchases the product. What
happens is that Chitika tracks people arriving at the
website via search engines and then converts the search
engine string into a series of related products that it then
shows in the advertisement and on which the visitor can
click to purchase. This is referred to as impulse marketing
and works in the form of
what
Chitika refers to as Premium Ad Units or eMinimalls.
While not a standalone alternative to Adwords
feel free to give it a try as a way to compliment
your other advertizing services.
For advertisers and media buyers,
Chitika
is a proven channel for targeting on-line consumers and
qualified buyers. If you visit a site
showing Chitika's ads from a search engine then the
Chitika
premium ad unit kicks in showing you ads that are specific
to your searching -
otherwise the publisher can have it show an alternative ad provider,
such as adsense, or they can just have it collapse away to
show nothing.
Chitika allows you to display targeted products
based on what people searched for to get to the page
providing
a robust comparative shopping experience and an additional
way to advertise your goods.
AdToll pays is an adwords alternative offering creatives
that charge on a CPC basis. Their user interface is
extremely good providing an easy way for you to manage your
campaigns and design your ads. As an advertiser you can also
transfer earnings from any publisher accounts you have in
order to expand your advertising campaigns without extra
expenditure. This sort of integration is entirely missing from Google's adwords
program.
AdToll's newest technology is the Peel Away Ad.
This is a technology that allows you to advertise in the
form of ads that peel away on
the top right hand side of a web site. The key to this ad
format is that when the mouse moves
over the peel it opens in a smooth manner to reveal the
advert underneath. As an advertiser the key to a successful
campaign is getting people to notice your ads and this new
format from
AdToll is perfect since it is not offered by any other
providers and thus is something different from the run of
the mill pop-up / pop-under / skyscraper ads that most
website visitors have now learnt to ignore. The new ad
format allows publishers to make use of the lesser
used, yet highly visible top corners of web sites and
provides you the advertiser with a space to place your ads
that is both noticeable and intriguing to website visitors. It is
also a very non intrusive form of advertising to the site visitor
and so does not annoy people like other forms of advertising
do. This all translates into more exposure of you ads for
less money and better conversion ratios.
Yahoo are currently trying to play catch up to
Google Adwords by offering their own copycat service which
offers the same context sensitive
advertising. In theory this promises to add some more
competition to the Adwords arena which should act to lower
bid prices, however, in reality Yahoo's Adwords competitor
has been in beta test for several years now and doesn't look
like being a serious competitor anytime soon. Their terms
and conditions are just as stringent as Adwords and they
have the same $100 minimum payouts and large up front
expenditures required by advertisers. They also seem
reluctant to add any small time advertisers and most
potential publishers don't even receive an acknowledgement
of their application. As such their network is small and the
reach of your ads will be minimal. However, their bid
prices, because of this, should be lower than Google's
Adwords and so it can potentially offer better value for
money, however, the small scope may limit campaign
effectiveness. Hence until
it finally comes out of beta and goes live and it becomes clear what type of
advertisers Yahoo will be targeting I can't place it any
earlier in this list.
Advert wise Yahoo Publisher Network features:
Context sensitive ads related to the
content of the website being viewed. Charges are
based on qualified clicks.
Integration with other Yahoo!
services into web site is offered including things such
as My Yahoo! RSS Feeds etc.
Targetpoint is a reasonable Adwords
alternative with services that are particularly suitable for
someone who wants to have
absolute control over the appearance of their ads. They provide strict supervision over ad content
which preserves the quality of their network and reduces CPC
and CPM costs from fraudulent clicks and sites.
While they initially appear to be a good alternative they
can be very choosey regarding which sites are accepted into
either the advertising or the publishing programs. They are
mainly interested in very large accounts and so if you are a
small business owner looking for a cost effective but small
advertising solution then this is probably not the best
choice but does provide and alternative if all else fails.
Advert wise Target Point provide:
Adpoint provides support for context-relevant, revenue-evaluated ads.
Exitpoint provides a way to show your ads to web site exit traffic.
Imagepoint allows you to use visual ads. These are known to the rest of the
world as Image ads.
At first glance FastClick would appear to be
one of the better alternatives to Google's Adwords program
providing a range of value ad products to advertisers along
with lower CPM and CPC costs that Adwords. However
they are only interested in large customers and so most
people will not qualify. You would have thought that these companies would
have learnt from Google's success realizing that the best way
to make money is by targeting both small and large target both large and small
customers. Does anybody remember Excite? They became extinct because they only
focused on the top 100 companies rather than targeting
custom location aware ads to the small guys
who can't afford large TV commercials. But, I digress. If you can get
yourself accepted to FastClick (now called ValueClick) then
you will probably be able to run some excellent campaigns on
high profile websites. However, be prepared to pay for the
privilege.
