Few people have an unlimited budget for pursuing a pay per click advertising campaign. Given this, it raises the question of whether you should use search engines where the bids are high or smaller engines where the bids are much less and you can stretch your money? Let's take a look.

Pay per click has always offered up a rather simple bid format. Although services like Google and Yahoo have tried to complicate it by offering ranges of bids, the simple fact is you can get a pretty good idea of what you are going to spend per click on a particular campaign. If you run tests across various search engines, you will soon notice something. A click that costs $1.25 on Google costs $.90 on Yahoo and much less on sites like 7Search.com. So, which should you use?

The first thing to understand about bid prices is they tend to reflect the quality of the traffic. Traffic on Google, for instance, tends to convert better than traffic on lesser search engines or so it seems at first glance. This is why people are willing to bid higher for clicks.

So, does this mean you should always go with Adwords and such? Well, many people do, but that doesn't mean the smaller search engines don't have little gold mines on them. You will laugh, but I used to kill it with psychic terms off of Kanoodle years ago. The bid prices were low, but they converted as well as the bigger engines. Alas, this changed which is why I am willing to tell you!

There is no "right" answer to the selection question. The real way to make a determination is simple. You need to test campaigns on the different platforms. Frankly, you should be doing this anyway. You might not think it is worth your time, but I can tell you that it is. Finding a niche on a cheaper search engine that converts well is the path to making massive profits. It just takes some time and effort.  

Thomas Ajava writes about cheap pay per click advertising and other pay per click topics for PayPerClickServiceCompanies.com.