No more ppc on Ask

Brentman

Brentman

New member
Jun 16, 2010
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I received the following email when inquiring about ppc :

"Ask Sponsored Listings is no longer accepting new self serve pre pay advertiser accounts and will be discontinuing this channel on September 30th, 2010.

We appreciate your interest and wish you the best of luck in your advertising endeavors.

Sincerely,
ASL Client Services "
 


What the fuck does that mean? All existing accounts get a refund?

PS: I didn't get the email, neither the interface shows any details
 
Maybe the system is now defunct because of their new Pureleads program. Reply! got a 10mil investment for being local ballers. It could be they want a piece of that pie.
 
I used to see that notice in my login, but quickly disappeared. Any emails I send for account questions get answered (relatively) quickly. Any emails about them closing doors are ignored.
 
Anyone have a contact at Ask who can clear this up?

I ran into the same issue as the OP a few weeks ago. Saw that response when going through the sign up. I called their corporate office twice. Woman who answered had no idea if they were still accepting advertisers. Eventually got transferred to VM for ASL, and was told "voicemail box was full".

:repuke:
 
I had some decent volume with a really good ROI going there before Pureleads - Apparently pulling my money initially due to fraud traffic got me placed on their "premium traffic" partners when they begged me to start advertising again, so post the initial fraud issues, traffic was awesome. And then Pureleads came along... And was worse than the original issues. And they masked referrers, so there was no way to block the shit publishers.

I spoke with one of Ask's head biz dev guys a few months ago (for some stupid reason he left Google a few years back to come over to Ask...), and the bullshit that this guy was spewing was ridiculous. Contradictions and excuses galore, with the only resolution being that if I was willing to spend a ton of money with them again, their team would create "proper account structure" and optimize my campaign for me. Right, after telling me that even their account team couldn't see referrers anymore due to Pureleads, if I was willing to commit a few $k/mo with them, somehow that would help quality...

My account doesn't seem to show any notice of them stopping the platform, but I hope they go down in flames.

Shit, if Barry Diller wasn't able to answer my question last year (to his face,at a friendly event) about where Ask was going in terms of growth, you know they're fucked.
 
i stopped bothering about ask after they went crazy with their zwinky campaign's ad guidelines.
 
Yeah their traffic sucks but I got some types of financial niche working there before. Haven't tested this PureLeads program though.
 
Well it's a good thing I didn't pursue this. I tried setting up an account with them awhile back, but I ended up calling and then sitting on hold for an hour and no one picked up, even after the hour. So if they go down... oh wellz.
 
yea I was advertising a very targeted email-submit offer with them, and I got 100 clicks and 1 conversion, LOL...

I did the same one with Bing and got a 37% CVR.

I'm not sure how their traffic is so bad though. Maybe it's fraud or something?
 
This is beating a dead horse a bit, but got this a few minutes ago

Dear Valued Customer,

On September 30th, 2010 Ask Sponsored Listings will be discontinuing the self-service credit card channel which you are utilizing to fund your advertising account.

In an effort to allow you to maximize your advertising efforts, we will keep your account active but will be disabling the auto refill feature on September 1st, 2010. This means we will no longer automatically fund your account by debiting your credit card as we’ve done in the past. In late September, the Ask Sponsored Listings Client Services Team will begin deactivating all self service credit card advertising accounts and processing refunds for their remaining balances. We expect all refunds to be completed before the end of 2010. To review the timeline which describes the account deactivation process, please visit our FAQ.

We appreciate your business and wish you the best of luck in your advertising endeavors.

Sincerely,
ASL Client Services
Click to expand...

My experience seems to be out of the ordinary compared to others on this thread, but Ask had been a nice little money maker for me - sad to see them go. I didn't compete on overly-competitive keywords, but really more of the mass direct linking for profit on close to minimum bid keywords. Their guidelines were night-and-day easier than screwing with google or msn.

Oh well - guess that helps keep me focused on creating real businesses instead of essentially being a "day trader" of marketing.
 
thanks avalanche for the update but i still didnt understand what exactly are they trying to do. They are discontiuing self-service credit card channel, does that mean they will now only work with the big boys? its a mess and the only good thing is we will get the money back if ever we are lucky lets c.
 
Excellent site, keep up the good work. I read a lot of forums on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your forum. Thanks
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Bad Credit Card
 
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