Adwords Versus Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture)

I am managing the PPC campaign for my wife's ecommerce site, and it's interesting to me that the cost per conversion from her Yahoo! clicks is consistently lower, for virtually every keyword, than they are for her Adwords clicks. Why are people willing to pay more for Adwords? I realize Google is busier than Yahoo, but the cost per conversion should be more important to people that it seems to be. There are also companies that advertise via Adwords and skip Overture altogether. Why? It you're willing to pay $9 per conversion to Google, why wouldn't you pay $6 to Yahoo for another bunch of conversions?

 

digitalpoint, that is a good point. I guess the other point would be that Google gets more searches than Yahoo and therefore can potentially provide more traffic.

 

I will use both and of course G get more traffict thats is why the cpc is higher.

 

This month we have converted 86 adword referals and 59 yahoo referals. However, the google referals have cost over twice as much as the yahoo referals. My point is, if you have a limited budget your dollar will go further with yahoo, and if you can afford more than you're missing out if you're not using yahoo.

 

It totally depends on the site.

 

I am with Crazy Bob if you are in a low budget stick with Yahoo.

 

My Overture costs (per keyword) are much higer than the exact same ones with Adwords.

 

My cost and pain level are much higher with Yahoo. The Adwords system was built by someone who has some understanding of interface design. I can start a new campaign in a few minutes with 100's of keywords whereas Yahoo takes significantly longer and then has a great opportunity to delete a bunch of manually inputted information with it's "Single Title and Description for All Keywords" right where a submit button belongs. Then you wait several days for an approval or worse a rejection. I have had campaigns rejected by Yahoo that pointed to pages that had a significant amount of content supplied by Yahoo. For the usability issues, delayed approval and rejections, and the higher costs I have a hard time thinking about setting up more campaigns on YSM. I hope they plan on catching up with Adsense.

 

Google is by far the best, but you have to be smart. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Use a combination approach organic seo and paid inclusion. I also recommend if you can using animated banners with Google image Ads on their content network, they get much better click-throughs than text ads. I think internet users are getting used to seeing Google text ads everywhere. If done right banners can bring alot of traffic. I really think that banner ads are going to make a come-back.