AdMedia’s Bid4Keywords: Quality Traffic or Scam?

Here at Portent, we’re always looking for new advertising platforms to test out. We’ve had our eye on AdMedia’s Bid4Keywords paid search advertising for a while. AdMedia has been offering Bid4Keywords service since 2007, but we had never given it a try, until now. We set up a test to get to know the service with the goal of increasing traffic to our site and building up our list of users for our remarketing campaign. Here’s how our $450 investment worked out for us.

How AdMedia’s Bid4Keywords works

According to the Bid4Keywords site, ads are displayed across many different channels including email, domain, social and search networks. Campaign creation is quick and easy, and management is transparent due to a user interface that allows advertisers to view and make adjustments to their account at any time. Ads can display anywhere around the world and bids can be as low as $0.05.

Setting up our account

To set up our account, I contacted an AdMedia representative. He got me squared away with an account and an advertising pixel. For this test, I made one campaign containing 76 keywords and 2 ads. Bid4Keywords allows you to input as many keywords and ads as you want (title: 65 characters, ad body: 200 characters).

The account dashboard is fairly simply to figure out, and if you run into issues managing the campaign, the AdMedia reps are there to help.

The test

The goal of this test was to promote the Portent PPC Essentials package and build our remarketing list. Here is an example of one of the ads:

Our keywords were all focused on “low cost ppc advertising,” “small budget pay per click management” and “small business ppc services.” Both ads directed traffic to our PPC Essentials landing page.

Result! Is Bid4Keywords too good to be true?

The test ran for just over a month, spent $450 and collected 6,400 clicks. At first glance, Bid4Keywords looks like an amazing way to drive traffic. I mean $0.07 cost-per-click! How could anyone pass that up?

Well, a slightly deeper look into our Google Analytics reveals why you should be more hesitant to put all your advertising eggs in the Bid4Keywords basket.

Bid4Keywords was giving us tons of cheap traffic, but at over a 90% bounce rate and average visit time of 13 seconds, you can see the quality of traffic was crap.

The results from our test were unimpressive to say the least. But, this test did provide us with some useful insight to pros and cons of the service.

Pros

• Very cheap clicks
• Simple set up for the most part (I had no experience and figured it out with no problem)
• Decent targeting options (location, page, negative keywords, exact and broad match types, day parting, manual max CPC and keyword max CPC)
• No ad policy. (Seriously, I asked them and the response was, and I quote “as long as people on the network are searching for it, you will come up in the results.”) This means you can use Bid4Keywords to advertise things that Google or Bing will not (i.e. online gambling, essay writing services, political ads, tobacco products, or adult services)

Cons

• Very poor traffic quality
• User interface does not provide impression statistics (no CTR)
• Limited information as to which sites the ads are actually showing on

Should you use AdMedia? No and maybe

AdMedia is a legitimate company. Their representatives are very professional and easy to work with. That being said, the traffic quality is terrible. The initial goal of this test was to build up our remarketing list. Our lists did not show a noticeable increase in users added per day while Bid4Keywords was running. On top of that, it seems safe to say that the quality of the users we gained will be as poor as the results of this test.

Cheap clicks are nice and all, but I’d rather pay a little more to get quality clicks from users that are actually interested in my site’s services. A 90% bounce rate and 13-second visit times are not what I’d call conversions. Take my advice and steer clear of Bid4Keywords. That is unless you are advertising anything on Google Restricted Products and Services list like online gambling and adult services.