Review of Search123

URL: http://www.search123.com/
Signup page: http://www.search123.com/cgi-bin/NewAccount.cgi

Search123 is a pay per click search engine where webmasters can list their sites / pages instantly, and pay a fee everytime a surfer clicks on one of their listings. It works a bit like google or overture does but has lower traffic. Of course it does have some advantages too - like the price you pay for every click can be lower than it is on the big PPC engines, and there's far less competition on Search123 too.

Getting set up

The set-up procedure for Search123 was about the easiest one I remember going through. Creating the initial account is totally free and is very similar to the kind of web form you'll have filled out at a new sponsor. You'll end up with a username, a password and a page which you can then log in to. It should only take minutes to get through the initial form and get logged into the advertiser's area. If you've been through the hell that is 7search's set up procedure, you'll appreciate how smooth this one is.

In the advertiser's area

Search123 has what I'd call the simplest and fastest advertiser's area of all the PPC search engines I use. There's a simple set of text links to the left of the screen which give access to the core of the engine's functions:

• Fund

• List

-Create Listing
-Update Listing
-Set Spending Limit
-Delete Listing

• Bid

- Bid on Keywords
- Modify Bids

There's no fancy designs, no frames, no graphics to wait for. It's plain, ugly and fast - exactly as an advertiser's area should be.

The first job is to add $25 worth of funds or more to your account. $25 is the minimum amount you will need to pay to be able to use Search123. The price of a click to one of your sites or pages is 1 a one cent minimum. This is pretty healthy compared to Google's 5 cent minimum, or Overture's 10 cent minimum bid, or Mamma.com's colossal 15 cent per click minimum bid.

Adding pages

Clicking Create Listing (under the BID link on the left of the screen) takes you to a page similar to a link list add site page. You add in a URL, a title (which will be the linked text on the search engine results pages), and a description (max length 255 characters - but you'll likely not need that much to get the job done...) There's also something which will be very welcome to any adult webmaster out there: a box to classify your site as adult. This was a hint that Search123 was an adult friendly search engine. And that needs to be talked about more.

Search123 is one of those rare PPC engines which seems to acknowledge that adult webmasters exist, and doesn't want to throw it's hands up in horror run away. There's no restriction on using adult terms, no-one goes through your listing and disapproves it for 'innapropriate language', no one will tell you that your keywords are 'not adult enough', or pull your porn site listing for any one of a million other stupid reasons. If you've dealt with Google's PPC system before, and the editing staff there, you're in for a breath of fresh air at the listing-sites stage of Search123.

Bidding

Once a page is added it's time to tell Search123 which phrases it should appear under (the beauty of PPC search engines!) You choose a listing (created in the previous section I mentioned) and then you pick 25 keywords which are pasted into a large box and need to be separated by a comma. There's no keyword selection tool provided with Search123 which some folks won't mind anyways. I mean Overture and Wordtracker will do that job for you easily anyway.

One thing I DID miss here was some kind of Search123-specific keyword prediction tool. Google will estimate your daily traffic, Overture's tool provides monthly searches on each keyword, but there was no way of really knowing with Search123 which phrases were being sought after. A cynic may think that the reason this tool is not there is that it could expose how few searches are actually made at Search123, making the engine seem like a small player. Whatever reason it was not there, it meant that this was going to be a process of trial and error, and using previous keyword research.

Problems with Search123

Well I guess I better get to the negative stuff here. Sadly, there's a lot of it. This was kinda disappointing for me because I always favour the under dog. I would have liked nothing better than to spend all my advertising budget with Search123, as opposed to one of the megalomaniac monsters like Google or Overture, but the fact is that there's some pretty glaring errors at Search123 that are hard to forgive.

One message that I got more than a little tired of seeing when modifying / adding new listings was: "Due to server capacity, your request could not be completed. Please attempt request again, or contact Client Services for additional assistance." This is something which is sure to put a lot of advertisers off. I found that a number of retry's could get past this barrier with persistence, but it should never be there in the first place. It makes working with listings a frustrating affair.

Customer support is lacking also. Despite some of my negative comments towards the editing staff at google, the support staff there will answer emails always within a 12 hour period. On the emails I have sent to Search123 I have yet to hear back - and it's now a matter of days. Of course this could be just my experience with them. I was trying to find out how to MODIFY keywords (which I can't find an option for - another glitch in the system).

The reporting is another major problem with Search123. The problem lies in the way reports are generated. There's the usual screen which lets you see how much you've spent, and which keywords are being clicked - everything you'd expect or want from a PPC search engine's reports. Where it trips up is that you have to WAIT a long time for a report to appear. It is not instant. You 'request' a report and then have to come back some time later. I requested a report about an hour ago and it is still not ready yet. Reports at Google and all other PPC engines I've tried are instant. Waiting around for data is more than frustrating.

There's also no feature to compare the top listings for a given phrase at Search123. This means that it's a lengthy process to find out how much each of the top ten spots are paying for their clicks. If you are number 11, and you want to be number 10, you've got to painstakingly add a cent to your bid, search on Search123 for the phrase, and see if you've risen above the competition. 7Search, for example, makes it easy to see what the top spots are paying for their positions. This is lacking with Search123.

Traffic is another factor that's more than a little off-putting. Even a listing in the top ten for a medium to highly popular keyphrase might not being in any traffic. Bids DO start at 1 cent, but it's hard to actually get a click for 1 cent. It's clear that Search123 is one of the lowest search engines as far as traffic goes. You'll either need to carefully outbid some people for competitive phrases, or ad a lot of listings - casting your net in a vast ocean to try to catch the scattered fish floating around out there. So the low minimum bid price is not always a bonus. If you don't get any traffic for your $$ - there's really no point.

Summing up

As I always point out when I write reviews of PPC engines, it's still early days. 7 search could improve it's area, build more traffic, and fix any of the points I've made here. It could be that when I add more listings my traffic will grow anyway. It's not all bad either, and would make an ideal engine for anyone who wanted to learn PPC without wading into the deep end with one of the bigger players. All in all a fairly disappointing PPC engine but I am keeping an open mind and looking to test it further as time goes by. As always, I'll keep you posted.

Ease of use: 8 / 10
Reporting: 3 / 10
Adult webmaster friendly: 9 / 10
Friendly rules / use no content sites: 9 / 10
Performance: 3 / 10
Traffic: 2 / 10

OVERALL: 5
Half of Search123 is well done, the other 50% is unbearable.

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com

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