13 PPC Engines: Which Ones Actually Convert?

Today, Chad from CDF Networks made a post on his blog which is titled "The 13 Pay Per Click Network Challenge." The basis of the post is that Chad ran one affiliate offer during the month of August across thirteen different PPC networks. After ten long days of compiling data, Chad has some interesting results to share:



As you can see from the chart above, Chad rated each engine on three different factors: traffic rate, conversion rate and click pricing. The traffic rate and conversion rate categories ranged from one (being the worst) to ten, while the click pricing category could be scored from one to five (which makes a total of 25 possible points).

As the chart shows, Chad found that Yahoo was the best overall PPC engine. He states:


As he acknowledges in his post, many people may be surprised to see that Yahoo and MSN have higher conversion rates than AdWords. Although Google sends much more traffic, he states that the conversion rate has always been lower for the majority of niches that he has tested.

Although we all know that Google, Yahoo and MSN are the top three PPC engines, Chad found that while Looksmart did not send nearly the amount of traffic that the other networks did, the traffic that was sent converted well.

Of Chad's six recommended networks, the one that surprised me was Ask. Although it placed fifth in this test, you may want to read Amit's (of Super Affiliate Mindset) awful experience with Ask. Here's an excerpt of what he had to say: