Clicksmart is a clever internet advertising scam. Austin Texas

Our company was contacted by Clicksmart last spring. I was led to believe Clicksmart was owned by Yahoo and they were competing with Angies List and Service Magic. I was told their contractor page would appear in the top listing on Google and Yahoo. I had many questions and concerns and all were answered by my sales representative. I then submitted search engine keywords, to be purchased by Clicksmart, to drive business to our company.

I made the mistake of signing up for this "service" to the tune of $3540.00. After sigining up I had difficulty even finding Clicksmart's contractor web site using generic search keywords like Minneapolis contractors (So how is this going to increase my business?). I always find Service Magic, Angies List, Yellow Pages or Best Contractors when searching for contractor listings in my area. I called with concerns and questions and was treated very rudely by Jason at Clicksmart. I asked to terminate our relationship and I was threatened with 3rd party collection (and called names) , if I tried to break our "agreement". He laughed when I told him I was reporting Clicksmart to the Better Business Bureau.

In my opinion this is a very clever scam. They rely on the fact that many businesses won't monitor their web presence very closely. So Clicksmart buys the absolute bare minimum amount of search words from the major search engines (I wonder how much they are really spending with Google and Yahoo?). If you complain you are threatened. If you terminate payment you are harassed and verbally abused on the telephone.

In my opinion, signing up with this company is like being sold premium advertising space ("a nice, glossy flyer"!), in your, local, Sunday newspaper ("with a distribution of 250,000 papers", the salesmen says, with a smile!), only to discover afterwards that your ad appeared only once in every 50,000 newspapers.

Yep, 5 people out of 250,000 could have seen your ad.

"You just have to understand that advertising is a very complicated process"!

Chris
south st paul, Minnesota
U.S.A.