Just bought listings from Altavista

From: Dana Todd <Dana_at_sitelab.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:30:32 -0500 (CDT)

Well, we just bought our first paid listings on Alta Vista
for one of our clients, and here's what we think. First of
all, it's currently a pain in the patootie because it's a
manual "auction" wherein we agreed on a top bid with our
client and went head-to-head with competitors in 5-cent
increments like eBay, but we had to manually input our bid
each time. Toward the end of the day, they had technical
difficulties and had to shut down early and reopened the
next day. All told, we had to devote a day and a half to
the process! (and the rates are net, non-commissionable)

Good points:

They say they'll automate the process in the next 30 days so
we'll have less babysitting to do.

We managed to get most of the phrases we wanted for a
relatively cheap click-through price (most went for less
than a dollar).

The links will appear with whatever title and description we
want, and will feature a starburst or other snipe next to it
at the top of the list.

There are only two "special" positions available for each
phrase, so it doesn't eat up half the results page and make
AV look tacky/commercial. Also, we didn't have to compete
$$-wise for #1...we were happy with #2!

Since text links often get just as high (or higher) a
click-through rate as banners, we got a great deal on most
of our words. Also, we were able to buy phrases that we had
previously been locked out of (a competitor had beaten us to
the banner buy).

Bad points:

It's hard to clear a budget with clients up-front because we
have to guess the amount of click-throughs (we estimated at
7%).

It's not automated yet...BTW, when it is automated, are we
going to have the same problems with this that eBay does,
wherein savvy media buyers send bots to bid for them at the
last second and wipe us honest bidders out?

It's non-commissionable, so we have to figure out a rate
structure with clients to compensate our time planning and
monitoring the process. Most of our clients are more
comfortable with a commission so they don't have any
variable costs in their budget. Alta Vista should really
consider paying commission on this to agencies.

Why we won't drop our optimization companies yet:

AltaVista isn't the world's only engine, and in fact
currently gives us the worst click-through rates for most of
our consumer words.

Links lead to links...we get traffic from the weirdest
places, and with all the "recycled" databases out there it
helps to keep up the muscle-work of optimization and
submission.

All in all, I think it's great. I wish all the engines
would do it!



*****
Dana Todd
SiteLab International, LLC
2223 Avenida de la Playa #208
La Jolla, CA 92037
(619) 456-4720 ext.102
(619) 456-4724 fax
http://www.sitelab.com


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Received on Fri Apr 16 1999 - 10:50:27 CDT