When you think about how hard life is for many people on AdWords there’s never been a better time of late for the cheaper Pay Per Click search engines to seize the oppotuinity and soak up the adspend that used to be all going via Google and invest in their systems etc. Yet in reality two of the superstars of yesteryear are still snoozing in the sun like fat lazy labradors, seemingly taking anyone as a publisher and looking the other way until an advertiser complains, then only usually blocking the offending publisher for that one advertiser.

I took a look at one of our last running Miva campaigns yesterday and found we’d had 1,300 clicks over a 7 day period on a keyword which isn’t even the main term for the sector, it exceeded the main term by a factor of three and was at a far higher cost per click than all others in the campaign, so it appears it has been targeted by one or more sites (probably just one by the looks of it) based on it’s higher CPC, of those extra 1,300 clicks over normal we had around 25 extra on site clicks so made a loss on the traffic received so it seems the traffic isn’t so squeaky clean and all that interested in what they supposedly clicked on.

It would be nice to know in our admin panel exactly which keywords had converted to an action for us but seeing as Miva think conversion tracking isn’t worth offering we can’t see that information in Miva, it’s the same with Mirago too, zero conversion tracking options, and this is from two of the longest established players in the PPC game.

Miva’s advert on AdWords says “Compare MIVA’s Bid Prices To Other Networks Here & Get a £25 Ad Credit” it made me laugh, the bid prices are so low because traffic quality is mostly dire, a 20p click on Miva yields a one in five to ten on site action in our experience when compared to Yahoo or Google so actually costs more like £1.00 to £2.00 per genuinely interested user click.

Calculating the real click value got me thinking back to the heady days when getting a PPC feed was a ticket to print money (legitimately), an Overture (now Yahoo) feed was the fabled land of the £15+ Loan and £20+ Mortgage traffic clicks so getting one wasn’t easy as they understood that quality was key to keeping bids high, so it was Espotting (now Miva) that was the choice of many as it had less stringent acceptance criteria, after that it was Mirago as that was the least choosy of all, it seems they decided  that short term gain rather than a long term viable business plan was the way forward, hence the steady decline of bid prices to bargain basement levels.

In the space of a couple of short years both Miva and Mirago have seriously dropped the ball, and it didn’t even bounce, (Yahoo to a degree too but they at least, are working very hard to rectify matters) it just made a phhhrrrrt sound as it deflated!, Now don’t get me wrong, both Miva & Mirago have some great staff, very polite, nice people who are a pleasure to deal with but their product quality and functionality just isn’t that good anymore from what I’ve seen of it and now they appear to be the playground of the click pimp and it seems the share price would reflect this quality trend too : 

We don’t run much with either Miva or Mirago anymore as a result of the traffic quality so that which we do is only incidental traffic of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, having had a fair few refunds for very poor traffic on an ongoing basis it’s a case of picking the right keywords and the right positions (usually not 1,2 or sometimes even 3) and regularly review traffic and exclude irrelevant and incentivised sources by asking them to block sites with little relevancy or high traffic and low on site action etc.

Virtually everything you can advertise on lately has conversion tracking, it’s a no brainer that if you spend your cash you want to see what happens with it and as some of you will no doubt have seen tracking the pixels flying by you’ll know that even the dirtiest hobbit of them all, AdWare, sometimes offers conversion tracking, Yet here’s Miva and Mirago still featureless on that score so I’d love to hear even just one valid reason why Miva & Mirago do not have conversion tracking available, and whilst we are on about essential features that are missing Miva doesn’t even have daily budget control never mind conversion tracking, now how dire is that for an 8 year old Pay per click platform!? it’s evolved very little in the 3,000 or so days since it was born !

Bearing in mind every other serious player in the PPC industry offers conversion tracking, just how long can Miva and Mirago carry on shovelling advertisers ad spend down their black hole without showing conversion data, in fact even AdBrite (I wouldn’t recommend them either though unless you are prepared to spend lots of time blocking sites) has conversion tracking AND on top of that they even shows you the source sites where your ads appear yet neither Miva or Mirago daren’t even show the keyword conversion data, it seems they are totally unwilling to provide this supremely important metric so I guess it (and the image below) illustrates in glorious technicolor just what faith they have in their traffic quality :

They both need to up their game and actively try to weed out the click pimps, yet Miva’s click fraud prevention is simply an IP block list provided by Quova and double ad click discounting and their traffic team relies on nothing more sophisticated than excel for analysing traffic !  Our in house developer could create a robust tracking system for a platform like these in no time yet here we are 8 years along for Miva and 9 years for Mirago and still no conversion tracking,  no doubt they are both just holding on with their well bitten nails for someone to come and buy them up before they are advertiserless.

Well at least their bid prices do look great but there’s a reason for how low they are, basically a click on either isn’t worth the same as a click on any other serious PPC engine that’s why the keyword : ”mortgage” is only £0.21p a click for position one today whilst on Yahoo it’s probably £5-7 a click and even more on Google.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in the sectors I’ve worked in with Miva and Mirago although to be fair they have been the main ones, One PPC client we took over was blowing £100 per sale on Miva, in the end it was so much hassle to chase it so we binned Miva as it just wasn’t worth it, especially as we took his CPA on google down from £7.50 to below £5 and trebbled the adspend!

Has anyone had success of any decent size with Miva and or Mirago of late ? surely some advertisers must do, if only away from the main sectors, although many merchants just throw it into the general mix and take a  ”cash in against overall profit out” of all PPC I guess so may be sat there totally unaware of just how poor it may be performing for them.