7Search - My Experience

Hello Warriors.

After reading about 7search here and on other forums, I decided to give it a try. Here is what I found...

I made three deposits over about three weeks.
Several campaigns were created to promote affiliate offers and email/zip offers.

Did I make any sales?
Yes.
Did I make money?
No.

I made one new sale returning $12 from $75 worth of clicks.

Okay, I can hear everyone saying optimize, block, scale up the good keywords, etc. and that is what I expected to do. But here are the problems.

1) Most traffic is suspicious! I had 78% of traffic without javascript enabled. And almost all of that traffic without javascript enabled was from a single source with unlimited resource ID's. They sent traffic on almost every common keyword in every campaign using many resource ID's making it too much work to manually block every RID for that source.

2) Blocking traffic is not a function that is provided outright. You have to discover that you can block, usually by reading someones blog about it (thanks Luke Peerfly).

3) Blocking only works for resource ID's (###RID###). When resource ID's are unlimited or appear to be generated automatically, then there is no stopping the source because you cannot block the affid. Blocking the affid still sends traffic from that source. Domain blocking is not available.

4) Support (by chat) are reluctant to block a domain for you and I didn't get this domain blocked after conversing with support staff.

My overall opinion of 7search is that it would be a good service provided that there is adequate means to remove the bad clicks and sources that are of no value. When 7search develops a platform that enables us to do that, then it might be worth funding a campaign or two. But their traffic quality is currently a mixed bag of good traffic and what I suspect to be automated bot traffic. Eventually you'll get conversions and identify good keywords. But you will still have an effort to remove traffic sources who can still send bad traffic using any of their multitude of resource ID's. You can block each one as they arise, but who has time for that.

My suggestion to 7search:-
Rather than provide us with blocking, why not provide us with the ability to optimize our campaigns by using our own whitelist. We could select the sources that can provide traffic on the keywords that pay instead of the current system where we eliminate keywords and sources that haven't converted yet. It would be better for advertisers, and probably help reduce click fraud because the sources that fail to perform will not be selected for any ongoing campaign (sources that are blocked can still provide traffic using another resource id under the current system).

Finally, Would I recommend 7Search to a friend?
Yes I would, providing they were able to track all clicks, and evaluated browser function and http headers for each click. If you just track clicks alone, you'll miss the ones that do not belong to a browser or otherwise get flagged as suspicious. And I would say that 7search is probably not the best traffic source for newbies who cannot afford to lose money during the discovery period (finding sources that pay).

Last Comment:-
I haven't used 7search for long and maybe it hasn't always been this way. It would be interesting to hear from newbies who started out with 7search recently and also from those with existing optimized campaigns, just for comparison.