Exoclick - Better Than Google AdWords?

Posted October 2, 2007

exoclick logo

If you’ve been looking for a Pay-Per-Click search engine where you can still get traffic for pennies, or if you’re just sick of all the “quality score” crap from Adwords, I may have found the perfect solution.

And that would be a small PPC search engine based in Spain, known as Exoclick. Let’s take a look and see what it’s all about…

Intro

Exoclick is a lot like Google, in that they have a platform for advertisers to buy ads and a platform for publishers to display ads. But it’s quite different at the same time, because it is simple to use and doesn’t have all the crazy regulations and restrictions that plague Adwords and Adsense users.

Advertising

Exoclick really shines when it comes to advertisers. It’s extremely simple to setup a campaign, and you can buy clicks for as little as 1 cent! Even better, you can outbid your competition by fractions of a cent!

To get started, just head to the signup page and enter your information. Then once you get into your admin panel, just click “Fund the Account” in the left menu and you’ll get instructions to pay with PayPal (or credit card through PayPal.)

The minimum to get started is just $10. It’s easy and safe to fund the account, too, because you can just make a one-time payment and not worry about having your credit card stored in their system and billed all the time.

Then you can start a campaign by clicking “New Campaign.” That presents you with a (gasp!) one-page form. Yep, just one page to fill out and your ads are set to go!

exoclick new campaign

It might be a bit confusing at first to setup the targeting based on category, country, keyword, and/or site, but once you see how it works, it’s very simple and quick.

Bids are a bit confusing, too, because you bid in cents. So entering “100″ means one dollar per click, while “1.5″ means one and a half cents per click.

Fill in your ad details and click “Create Campaign” and you’re done! Then you can track everything from the “Campaigns List” page.

exoclick campaign list

Stats, Reporting, and Optimizing

The campaigns list has the name, clicks, CPC, and status for each campaign, so you can get a good idea of what’s going on just by skimming that. Click “edit” to edit an ad or “stats” to see more details. (The stats will display at the bottom of that same page, so scroll down to see them after you’ve clicked.)

exoclick campaign details

(Note that you can target only US visitors if you desire.)

Exoclick lacks some of the advanced reporting features from Google, but I’ll gladly trade that for the cheap traffic!

My favorite part of Exoclick is optimizing my ad prices, so I use their “Bids Estimator” all the time. You can pick a category or enter a keyword, and it will return a list of ad titles and bids.

You’ll notice that a lot of bids are setup like 1.8 cents or 2.3 cents. If the top bid is 2.3 cents, you can up your bids to 2.4 cents and get the top spot! Similarly, if the top bid is 5 cents, only bid 5.1 cents to take over. Bidding 6 cents would just be a waste.

(When you’re getting hundreds or thousands of clicks, those fractions of pennies can really add up!)

exoclick bids estimator

That shows a top bid of 1.8 cents in the “webmaster” category!

Be sure to check the other tools, too, like “Traffic per site.” That lists the top 100 Exoclick publishers in order of daily hits, which will help you decide which sites to target. (It has CTR and CPC info, too.)

Publishers

Since Exoclick is so good for advertisers, it’s naturally a little lackluster for publishers. And by that I mean, with a 50% revenue share, you’ll probably get half to one cent per click.

But if you can’t get into Adsense or YPN, this could be a viable alternative.

Referral Program

There is a referral program built in, which pays you 5% of the revenue generated by any publishers you refer. That’s probably not going to be much though, unfortunately.

I don’t think you get anything for referring advertisers, though. (Which sucks, because that is what I’m recommending here!)

Other Services

When preparing this review, I noticed a few other services available through Exoclick. One happens to be text link ad sales, and the other is domain parking.

I don’t know why anyone would buy or sell text links publicly these days with Google getting all huffy and puffy about it, but it’s there if you’re so inclined.

However, I have some spare domains, so I decided to park one with Exoclick and see if anything happens. It’s simple enough to setup (even easier than Sedo,) and the pages do look nice. (You get three templates to choose from, along with a category.)

Here is my parked page in the Technology category using the default template:

exoclick domain parked page

Complaints

Just to sum up some of the complaints you might have:

Lack of really advanced reporting tools.
Low payouts to publishers.
Publishers, such as FeelingHealthy.net, are basically MFE (Made for Exoclick) sites.

Final Conclusions

Overall, I think Exoclick is great, and the positives greatly outweigh the negatives.

The super cheap traffic is simply amazing. You can get to the top in popular markets for as little as 5 cents!

Especially if you have adult sites, this could be a gold mine. (But you’ll have to sign-up and see the listings yourself, as I don’t want to publish those URLs here!)

I almost didn’t publish this because I wanted to keep the secret to myself, but I wanted to let my loyal readers know about a valuable resource! (And… Adwords was really pissing me off this morning! )