So to cut a long story short I´ve been using Google Adwords successfully for a few years and recently decided to expand my search marketing to Yahoo as well. Figuring that the campaigns worked well in Google I copied the same campaigns exactly into YSM. The adverts and the keywords are all identical, as is my target audience of US and Canada. What I don´t understand is that my impressions are tiny, maybe 2 or 3% that of Google, my clickthrough rate on average is half and my conversion rate even lower. I can´t see any logical reason for this so I was hoping someone with a little more experience of YSM would be able to shed some light on this. Is there any obvious reason why this is likely to happen, or some inherent difference between Yahoo and Google I should know about. If anyone has some explanation or advice I´d love to hear it!
The demographic of Yahoo searchers is different from Google searchers. This could be the reason. Or potentially you have more competition in the Serps on Yahoo.
Keep in mind that Google owns somewhere up to 85% of all ads online. As big as Yahoo is, Google's network is still significantly larger.
Bid amount plays into how many impressions your receive, you could have more competition on Y! causing your impression count to drop. Regarding CTR and CAC, I run campaigns on both Y! and Goog and different keywords/ads perform differently on each network. They key is to experiment and then analyze the data. Same goes for MS.