Sensis BidSmart

History

The Australian search engine developed by Telstra - Sensis - launched their own PPC service towards the end of 2004, called BidSmart. This provided sponsored listings at the top of the search results generated by the Sensis search engine, which is also used for web search results on other Telstra sites, such as BigPond, Yellow & White Pages, Whereis and CitySearch. The service was closely modelled on the original Overture service with a minimum 10c per click bid price, although it also now includes the feature of determining ranking position based on a combination of bid cost and clickthrough rate, as developed by Google AdWords. The service was discontinued in 2009 when natural and PPC search results were taken from Google instead.

Strengths

Although this PPC service has a relatively small coverage of the search market, it does support many of the popular Australian search and information tools, as well as the large BigPond portal site, and can be useful for local search marketing with the option to target search terms combined with a regional qualifier, from country and state to city and other smaller regional areas. The management interface is very clean and easy to use, plus the service includes a keyword generator with search volumes, similar to the Yahoo! Search Marketing suggestion tool.

Weaknesses

As noted above, BidSmart is unlikely to generate the search volumes of some of the main PPC providers, but it can be used to test national and regional search activity in Australia. The service doesn't provide any conversion tracking code of its own, so users may need to implement their own tracking or use the cross-channel tracking service from Google AdWords to pick up leads from this source.

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