Google Adwords vs Yahoo
Launched in 2000, AdWords is Google's flagship advertising service and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner adverts. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international, global distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line (a maximum of 25 characters) and two descriptive text lines (a maximum of 35 characters per line). Image ads can be one of several different sizes, as based on Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards.
Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay for each click. When a user searches Google's search engine on www.google.com (or www.google.co.uk in the UK), ads for relevant words are shown as "sponsored links" on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results. The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers' bids and the "quality score" rating of all ads shown for a given search. The quality score is calculated by historical click-through rates and the relevance of an advertiser's ad text, keyword, and landing page to the search, as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser's keywords. The auction mechanism that determines the order of the ads is a variation of the old Vickrey style auction.
Panama is an online advertising platform created by Yahoo!. The new advertising platform is Yahoo's effort to close the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising money and to claw back some of the percentage market share it has lost for internet search enquires. The first release was code-named Project Panama, which went live in October 2006 for the Yahoo!'s existing customers. In was rolled out in the UK in July 2007.
The platform provides advertisers with a digital dashboard where they can manage their marketing campaigns, aim ads geographically and test their effectiveness. It includes interactive tools that suggest to advertisers what to bid based on their budget and the number of users they want to attract. The 'quality index', as Yahoo! engineers call it, gives advertisers a sense of how the system will rank an ad, and sophisticated analytical tools that give advertisers insights on why certain campaigns are effective.
Yahoo inherited the search advertising business when it purchased overture (which had previously purchased another search ad pioneer, Goto). Until Panama, Yahoo search continued to operate the original simplistic algorithm which ranked text ads according to how much advertisers bid for the keyword searched by user. Meanwhile, Google operates under a more sophisticated model, which ranks paid ads on the basis of bid price as well as prior click through rates. This improvement generally produces higher click through rates (hence higher revenues) for the search engine. For example, an ambulance chasing solicitor bidding for keywords "back pain" will likely get lower click through rates (CTR) than a physiotherapist, regardless of what the two parties bid per click. An algorithm that eventually de-prioritises attorney's ad is better for the search engine (in terms of revenue produced) and the user (more relevant ads).
Despite the new similarities between their quality score/quality index principles, there are many differences between Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. For instance, AdSense. Google Adwords content network services provide one of the largest networks of individual niche markets on the internet. Currently Yahoo! Search Marketing does not have any form of network which can compete with this large web master bay, for the minimal cost per click Google Pays out.
Traffic is another example. According to the most recent figures, Google will provide you with approximately 66% of your traffic, and utilise roughly the same amount of your Internet Marketing Budget. Whilst Yahoo will take only 22% of your internet marketing leaving approximately 12% for MSN AdCenter.
The offline tool provided by Google (AdWords Editor) is another major difference. The tool, once installed on your computer, allows you to swiftly change bids, add/remove campaigns, adgroups and keywords and review performance of your account. Adding new accounts and making wholesale changes to campaigns is quick and easy with Editor.
The same cannot be said for Yahoo!. In order to make a bulk change to your account in Yahoo!; you have to download their CSV format file which is a copy of your account's campaigns, adgroups, ads and keywords. Working with a CSV file of this size in Excel is very cumbersome, even if you have a large desktop area - it's just too many columns to comfortably work with when you are dealing with thousands of rows worth of entries. Compared to working in AdWords Editor, this is a very poor way of dealing with the whole account - especially if you wish to make any kind of large scale restructure/reorganisation to the account, such as URL changes to the ad text across the board. Once desired changes are made and uploaded in the modified CSV file, however, inexplicable error messages are not uncommon and for someone entering the internet advertising arena for the first time, this can be quite daunting.
In conclusion, Google Adwords is widely considered to be the best search engine PPC system around today. Be careful with your budgeting, however, as your advertising expenses can run up quickly (Google is omnipotent at the moment and your ads will be clicked on). For the first few weeks of every campaign, monitor your results and use the conversion tracker extensively. At the end of this period, eliminate keywords you feel are underperforming and update your bids on the ones you see returns on. While Google is still the king of search, any serious PPC advertiser must also look at Yahoo Search Marketing. Failing to do so would eliminate a great deal of online advertising potential and diminish your market reach. While most advertisers will say that better results can be obtained through Google, Yahoo's search network can still be a force used to drive shoppers to your site. Our recommendation would be to try both together and then allocate funds as necessary. Be careful here too as Yahoo's high visitor counts can definitely drive up your advertising costs. The minimum bid on Yahoo tends to be twice that on Google so you may want to leave less-relevant search terms off.
