Which is better: Google Adwords or Yahoo Overture?

In your experiences, which are better and why?

 

It depends really on the market. Sometimes I had better luck with Overture and sometimes with Adwords. You should try both because sometimes they have different advertizers and it could vary on prices and conversion. I know your probably looking to see whats 'best' to go for one, but there is really no best as they are both the leaders and results per market.

 

Yep!

Adwords definitely works better for the sites I work with. But Overture works better for others.

Personally, I think just about every business can reap benefits from both.

 

As a business you really should be running in both. With that said, I consistently see a better ROAS with Google, compared to Yahoo! Search Marketing.

I see consistent traffic from my Yahoo! campaigns but the conversions vary greatly week by week. Google is consistently high, whereas Yahoo! may be good one week and bad the next in terms of my overall ROAS.

I'm curious to know if others see similar patterns in their analytics. It seems strange that the conversion rate can vary so greatly with Yahoo! and I don't see this same inconsistency with Google.

Would love to here some comparable stats from others.

For reference – my average ROAS with Google is approximately 225% and Yahoo! is closer to 160% (but based on the week this could be 100% or close to 200%). Very strange!

-c

 

As others have mentioned, it depends on the offer. In mu experience running some fairly robust campaings, a very broad generalization would be that Overture very rarely outperforms Google, and when it does it's usually for a consumer based ecommerce campaign. Even then, it depends on the product. Google almost universally works better for lead gen.

Think of Google users as more sophisticated and more prone to do research before buying. Yahoo users tend to be your average consumer.

That said, Yahoo has a problem with click fraud, much more so than Google. For an example, check out

www.recipes.com

On first glance, looks good, doesn't it? But all this site is doing is reserving Yahoo Search Marketing ads - NO ORIGINAL CONTENT AT ALL! Click on any of the links and you end up with a list of 'search results' that are nothing more then reserved Yahoo ads. A click on recipes from teh home page takes you too:

http://www.recipes.com/?show=recipes

And you see the Yahoo paid listings for that term. You can match them up by doing a search on the same term at www.overture.com.

Now try typing in ANY keyword to replace 'recipes' in the URL. You are served the Yahoo ads for that term.

If you have the misfortune to be an ad that can be reached from a click on the home page of the recipes.com site, or the MORE button in the lower right in the results page, guess what? Your ad gets banged by bots crawling the site.

One of the campaigns I was running had $400+ in click charges on one term originating from this site IN ONE WEEK. And there are dozens like it in the Yahoo distribution network.

So if you're doing any advertising in Yahoo, I'd be very sure to grab the referring URL and keep an eye on who is sending your traffic....

>>Forgot to mention that Recipes.com is bidding on keywords on Google to drive traffic to its site to then serve people Yahoo ads.

 

Adwords vs Overture an dth ewinne rin my opinion is Google Adwords

 

Great example iShopHQ! The fact that Yahoo is allowing this these types of partners lessens their value proposition, especially compared to Google. At least Google has a way for you to opt-out of these types of distribution partners. I will be watching my paid Yahoo referrals very closly now to see what patterns arise from these types of sites. Thanks!

-c

 

as I've said in the past, Yahoo has tended to be as sleazy as they can - $199 a year for listing in their directory? (Especially now that they've pushed it away from the main focus!). Then look at the sheer quantity of ads in their mail service which, by the way, you can't get away from (via mass export) unless you buy into the POP account feature. Then we have their treatment of the once-promising webrings... and they become ever-larger, and ever-more-greedy. Hard to believe they started out as a typical garage site and had the highest quality listings around! Then you look at Overture and they used to pay ONE PENNY per click even after their minimum was a nickel, and people were bidding up in teh dollars...before they got REALLY greedy and shut it down to all but high-volume sites.

Then we look at Google, which came out of nowhere with AdSense for Publishers, had an excellent revenue share from the start, with a FAST reporting site - rather unusual given their size! - and single-handedly rescued the nearly dead advertising market from the "25 cent CPMs for pop-up ads" condition it had been in. Suddenly everyone had to compete with Google to buy ad space and CPMs went from pennies to dollars.

Now Yahoo is doing a "me, too." Well, y'know what? They weren't around when I needed them.

 

I get much lower conversion costs from overture, but nowhere near the volume that I get from google. In general thin you need both.

Overture's interface is a nightmare however. I now work with someone there and we send excel files backwards and forwards...

 

I find overture easier to use, and had more luck about 5 to 1 for money spent with overture in the mid-tech market.

 

As stated before, a good robust campaign will be run on both (and soon MSN as well), but Google is lightyears ahead as far as their budgeting tool. Yahoo's tool has sucked since the time it was Overture. You can run through your monthly budget in a week if you're not careful, while with Google, they're accurate to nearly the dollar each day...and your ads are shown throughout the day.

Conversions for my clients have also been better on Google for whatever reason.

-Brian Renner
entrepreneur7

 

In the IT market google adwords definitely gives you better ROI.

I bet (and some of the Nielsen netratings data prove that) not less than 70% of IT and techie related traffic comes from google.

After all yahoo have always been pretty notorious for jerking up prices for every minor service within your advertiser account plus I dont think their fraud filter is nearly as sophisticated as google's.

And also one more - their auto billing trap within the advertiser account SUCKS BIG TIME!
I had to call the customer support 3 times before they restored mine to manual refill.

RS

 

I run several sites that have Overture ads. Info I can offer:

Don't worry about crawlers. A bot will indeed 'click' on PPC links from Overture, since they are returned to the partner site as an XML feed for the partner to modify as they wish. However Overture will certainly register the user-agent as a crawler and not charge for the click. I can back this up with my own data.

Overture are a much better option for partner sites for several reasons.

1. They give you much better control over your content. Because the links are returned as an XML feed, you can do whatever you like - I have implemented a complete tracking system which integrates fully with my Overture feeds. I also vary the display of my advertisments. Take a look at www.scubadiving.co.uk. The adverts on that site are Overture links. Now take a look at www.myfinances.co.uk. The 'of interest' box contains Miva links - Miva are a PPC company who supply their adverts through XML like Overture.

2. Overture simply pay better. This is a fact - anyone can verify this for any number of keywords.

Overture are a much WORSE option for sites looking for advertising for several reasons.

1. They are well estabilished and as such bidding is higher per click.
2. They are used by sites with next to no content, as already stated.
3. Classic Overture (as opposed to content match) are not targeted like AdSense - therefore your leads are less targeted.

Just my 2p...

- Jamie

 

IMO, if you know how to write your Google ads well, and you know how to constantly split test and outrank your current CTR, you'll do better with adwords.

Overture is simple enough to run, but I don't like their overall system. They also don't have a good enough way to massively upload keywords, as opposed to Google. Their CPC is usually higher, especially if you know how to write good ads in Google. Sometimes a single word in adwords could totally change your ad's performance really.

Adi Friedman
TwoBelievers.com Web Holdings.

 

I would agree that it depends on the market.

Sometimes I noticed they are about the same and other times on different projects I notice one is better than the other. However, either one can be total garbage at any time.