Site Analysis

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Atomm

Atomm

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Sep 29, 2006
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I ran across this site while setting up a new campaign. I looked it over, but couldn't figure out how they were actually making their money. I thought it might be a good learning experience to go through and figure out how they are building their site and what they are doing to make money.

FindStuff.com

The ads use this URL:/search.php?query=###KEYWORD###&source=seven

I plugged in a few keywords and it was just ads from what looks like their own in house ad program. They were also bidding for the top spot on the keyword I was working on, but when you go to their site, it's just 3 ads and nothing else. The ads don't even look like they are from one of the major providers.

Anyway, I was hoping to learn something and maybe others will too.

So, what do you see here?
 


That is definitally not inhouse ads.

It's a mixture of shopping arbitrage and ppc arbitrage.

Overture for the PPC and Yahoo Shopping Feed for the shopping $$$.
 
Overture feeds piss me off...

I am buying "sponsored search" keywords on Yahoo, yet these kinds of sites can buy tail keywords and display head ads that are delivered as search results.

I.e. They buy "Keyword Warranty" or "Keyword Phone Number" at a very cheap cost then land people on pages displaying my ads for just the Keyword. In essence these guys take a non-commercial search term and manage to get a commercial ad clicked.

This is probably 1/2 of the reason that my conversion rate on Yahoo blows when compared to MSN and Google.

I did a blog post on Yahoo dropping the ball yesterday.

It is stuff like this that dooms Yahoo to a 2nd tier search engine.
 
Interesting. So, how are they making money on the shopping stuff?

Are they basicly repacking Yahoo ads, even for the stuff you can buy?
 
Yahoo now has a shopping feed like shopping.com. You get paid per click for sending clicks to merchants who purchase the clicks in Yahoo Shopping. This is separate from the Overture Search Feeds.

The Yahoo Shopping Feed is still in Beta and I don't know many who have made it in. Here is an example page that Yahoo gave out at PubCon (I think) of a partner using the ppc shopping api.

Your DIGITALCAMERASDIGEST.COM Directory

You can do the same type of thing with the shopping.com api which re-opens after the new year.
 
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