Diorex

Shoemoney has opened up his blog to guest posts, which not surprisingly turned into an opportunity to Spam a little.

I have no idea who Big Daddy Lawson is, but he writes an open ended glowing review of Miva - the former stink pile known as FindWhat.

He talks glowingly about his particular niche and how Miva gets him clicks for half price, then hints that Ringtones or Home Equity loans would be worth trying there. Then ends with it “being all about the Money”

Got me to thinking that I know not a soul who has ever received any kind of ROI from this company. I have used them at 4 different companies that spend over $1 million a year for search (most far more). Each time giving them a try, setting a very low budget, very low CPC’s and still getting my entire budget depleted within a few hours and always with no conversions, despite enough traffic to have generated several at a minimum.

Now some might say, I had a bad landing page or bad ad copy or that even my server might have had issues that day, Miva reps certainly tried to make that point. They even went so far as to claim that what works for the other engines is not likely to work at Miva, because the audience is a little more sophisticated.

The last time it happened, I pulled server logs and realized that I was billed for hundreds of clicks despite showing only a few visits from Miva. Miva countered that the visits are from partner sites and would show up differently on server logs. We had set-up a unique URL just for them for tracking purposes and that was the data…Bottom line they were fraudulent clicks, Miva knew it and was trying to gloss it over.

Then a few months later, I get an email from a guy at Miva with a memorable enough name that i recognized it immediately when I got another note 9 months later at my new company. He sent the same exact 3 paragraph email to me at 2 different companies, even with a fake datapoint being the exact same data with the name of the industry changed. Slimy. He signed it “The traffic speaks for itself and results don’t lie.” Which is exactly what i thought about when I read the post on shoe’s blog.

I had a long conversation with someone yesterday who did not realize that Click through rate is important. he made the comment “Even on google?”. This made me think that there are lots of naive new affiliate marketers out there who are gonna read this post on Shoe’s blog and go throw some money at Miva.

Please save your time and money.

Please!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under PPC, Rants, affiliate, paid search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.