I'm considering pulling away from Google Adwords...I realize they are THE big shots, but they are so damn picky and arbitrary in the way they do things sometimes that it's almost not worth the added hassle...I mean, like nonsense where one day your ad has a quality score of 7 or 8 and then the next day it's at 1...same website, same CTR, same keywords... So, have any of you dabbled in Bing? I realize the exposure is not the same as with Google, but how would you compare the two in terms of being advertiser-friendly and also in terms of CTR... Thanks...
Good conversion still, similar system for creating ads, but id say that the main problem is that they can only bring you perhaps 1/20 of the traffic that the same keyworded ppc ads on google will bring... no way round that... except facebook ads now apparantly ... but I haven't got any experience with facebook really so can't comment.
Yahoo is pretty good, and they have decent traffic. Not as much as Google.. but there is some solid traffic. Yahoo and Bing have merged. Their mutual ppc network is going to be ready at the end of the year or the very beginning of the next one. The Yahoo And Bing Alliance will be a pretty serious competition to Adwords. What I like about yahoo is that they're way more lenient than google.
I've done pretty well with Bing in the past. Their CPC is way lower than Google's for a lot of keywords because it's less saturated. Also, my CTR was also always a lot better than on Adwords because there are less ads running on Bing so there's more of a chance for yours to get noticed. (at least those were my experiences, I can't speak for every market though) Yahoo I never had any luck with. Tons of clicks, never any conversions.
The biggest problem with Yahoo and Bing is that their traffic is WAY low compared to Adwords, so often it's a problem to find long-tails that actually get any searches, while in Adwords it's really easy. Cost wise, Yahoo or Bing are NOT always cheaper compared to Adwords, because if you know how optimize your landing page right, then with a high QS you can get even cheaper clicks, than with YSM or Adcenter. So you just have to try all of them and see what works for you.
Yes not enough traffic with Bing in my experience and Yahoo has a little more but Adwords still gets it, although being harder to manage.