I’m currently in that boat, as are some of our PPC folks here at InsureMe. I’m sad to report that my experience so far has been very similar to past experiences with second tier engines. From talking to other advertisers who have tried to scratch that second tier itch, it seems that there is a common pattern to how the second tier’s traffic comes in. I’m now referring to this experience as the “Second Tier Death Spiral” and it goes a little something like this:

1. You open an account, enter in a few keywords to see if working with the search engine is worth your while, and wait.
2. You check your stats and after a day or two, things look promising. You are turning a profit, albeit a small one, and you figure that putting some more time into your account will be worthwhile (even if working with the second tier company is a total pain in your backside).
3. You add more keywords using the best practices you have learned from your successes with Google and Yahoo!...you wait.
4. You check your stats after a couple of days and you are now hemorrhaging money…conversion has dropped wildly…you are suddenly upside-down.
5. You pull back bids, shut off keywords, and try to return your account to profitability.
6. You fail. Conversion continues to decline. You wonder where all this new garbage traffic is coming from.
7. You spend a month trying to get your deposit refunded from the search engine.

Sound familiar?

But you don’t have to take my word for it – our affiliate, my friend, and International Man of Mystery Magnus Wester forwarded me a link to a report from Marketing Experiments called Small PPC Search Engines Revisited. The report went out and tested various small search engines to see if they could get some positive returns. In the end, the report concludes:

While the performance of the small engines was disappointing overall, this testing provided a number of worthwhile insights. We were able to establish profitable campaigns for two of these companies, though the results were tenuous due to low volume.

Now I know that this conclusion doesn’t say “stay away from these bottomless pits of despair,” and like John Hasson points out in a past blog post, a lot of these second tier engines may do well in specific niches – but as I brought up last week, you really need to ask yourself if working on small engines is going to get you a better Return On Effort (ROE) than a Google are Yahoo account. Chances are, the answer is no.

So with all that said, here’s to the Second Tier Death Spiral, the Beautiful Losers of Search, and the fact that I know that by the end of the day, I will have opened another second tier search account.

What can I say? I still believe in that magical pile of second tier free money…

[Image Credit - The Beautiful Losers logo is from the Beautiful Losers book.]