"Paying for Clicks with MIVA"

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft may be the pay-per-click heavyweight contenders, another strong player is Miva. Offering pay-per-click in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, Miva is an independent search network(formerly known as Findwhat) powering over 2 billion search queries a month. You only pay for clicks on your ads, just as with the other pay-per-click networks. It's highly targeted traffic at an inexpensive price.
 
Miva works with hundreds of network partners, including portals, search engine directories and vertical niches. Some of their partners include: Infospace, Serchfeed, Memolink.com, Search.com, CNet.com, Reunion.com, Webcrawler, Excite, Metacrawler, Lycos, Dogpile and more.  

The cost for setting up a new advertiser account is only $25.00, and will take about 25 minutes of your time. It will take Miva 1 to 2 business days to verify and activate your account. All ads are reviewed and approved by their editorial staff. If you already have a pay-per-click search marketing account with someone else, you can send Miva your keywords in spreadsheet format to adsupport.usATmiva.com.

You can fund your account with credit card, money order, checks or wire transfer. Clicks on your ads are automatically deducted, and when your account is down to a 5.00 balance you'll be notified to add more funds. If you fail to add more money to your account, your ads will be taken offline until you do. If you don't want to be bothered with adding more cash to your account, you can elect to use "AutoReplenish" which will add any amount you set when your account reaches a minimum of $0.50. You can set a daily or monthly budget.  

When setting up your account, you'll need to create your ads, pick your keywords, place bids and create your campaigns. You can choose for your ads to run in the "Core Network", "Precision Network" or both.
 
The "Precision Network" focuses on select markets (verticals, which are specific markets or industries that come with a set of suggested keywords to bid on). It consists of distribution partners that may merge Miva ads with other third party ads based upon pricing and some other "considerations". The minimum bid on the "Precision Network" is only five cents. You'll receive the most traffic when participating in both networks.
 
Your campaigns can include both core and precision ads.  A campaign can contain multiple ads, must have at least one ad and be named. You can have up to 1,000 campaigns per account. But remember, an ad in the Precision Network can only include precision keywords. Precision ads are easily identified in your account setup by the bulls-eye icon appearing next to them.
 
The format for your ads is as follows: Title up to 50 characters, including spaces. Your description and display URL up to 250 characters, and finally your destination URL up to 1,000 characters.
 
Your ads can also be set to run on only certain days of the week. The minimum bid for all your keywords can be set individually or all at once. Your maximum bid is the highest amount you want to pay per click.

"Miva Match" is the expanded keyword search feature. It's automatically turned on for both precision and core keywords, but can be turned on or off for individual keywords. When turned on for your entire account, you'll receive more ad impressions. The bid price is whatever you have set for the keyword. Example: you bid 10 cents on "dog food". When someone searches for that term and clicks on your ad, that is what you will be charged. Similar to "broad keyword" matching with the other networks, your ads will also be shown for searches like "gourmet dog food" and "natural dog food".  

When placing your bids you have three options:

1) Autobid: Helps you to achieve the best ad position while
staying within your budget. Miva determines if your bids need
to be increased in order to retain your position, and increases
by one penny more than the next bidder who's bid is closest to
yours.
 
2) Manual Bid: You set each bid amount individually. Minimum
is five cents.
 
3) Bid Optimizer: Will automatically change your bid to keep
the ad position you want at the lowest possible cost.
 
There's no secret about what is being bid on by others. The top five positions for each keyword along with the bid amounts are shown. If two bidders have bid the exact same amount, the one who placed the bid first will be given the higher position.
 
The keywords you bid on must be relevant to your website. Each of your ads can have up to 500 keywords/phrases. If you have a lot of keywords you can use Miva's Excel spreadsheet to upload up to 500 at once.
 
Bids for the "Precision Network" can be placed manually or with "Auto Bid". The "BidOptimzer" is not available with their Precision network.
 
As with the other pay-per-click networks, you can set up "Negative Miva Match", which is a list of single keywords (not phrases) you don't want your ads displayed for if a searcher were to type them in.
 
You can use "AdAnalyser" to track click-throughs and conversions. You'll be given tracking code to place on your websites. Another tool called the "Keyword Identifier" allows you to track specific keywords so you'll know which ones are performing best. Again, it's a simple matter of cutting and pasting some code onto your web pages.
 
Detailed reporting is available so you can quickly view "keyword costs", "ad overviews", match and position overview, and more. Reports can be sent monthly, weekly or daily so you can see at a glance how much you're spending on traffic and exactly how much traffic you're getting.
 
Make no mistake about it - when setting up your pay-per-click strategy, Miva is a strong contender and one you'll want to include in your website marketing mix. For more information see: http://www.Miva.com