I’ve been running nearly identical small campaigns on Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored Search (YSS) for just over a month. I’m selling a “widget” for a friend/client.

These campaigns have the same keywords, the same ads, and I’m trying to keep the same positioning: 4-6 for my main keywords, then a bunch of long-tail stuff for which I’m paying $.03 - $.21 per click on both platforms. My maximum daily budget is not a consideration: it’s well above the actual cost.

The results are interesting. Since March 1:

Imp = Impressions; CTR = click-through rate; CPC = cost per click; Conv = number of conversions (sales); CPA = cost per action (sale)

That’s an average since the first of the month. Since then, I’ve been able to get down the cost of a click on Adwords to about $1.10, while it’s stayed much the same on YSS.

Possible interpretations:

1. I’m paying way too much for Adwords (partially true at least, witness the decline in my cost over the month)
2. Adwords is better at promoting my expensive keywords (possibly true)
3. For whatever reason, Adwords commands a higher price (definitely true)
4. YSS is a much better deal (seems to be startlingly true!)
5. There’s a social bias in the networks; one search engine attracts a different crowd than the other

This last interpretation is the interesting one to me, but I can’t find any data to support or undermine it. Aaron Wall has a long post about relevancy that includes some speculation about MSN having “defaultish” users, but that’s it.

Love to know if anyone has other ways to look at this, or knows of any data about the demographics of the users of different search engines.

Tags: Adwords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, MSN, Aaron Wall, search engine bias, compare cost of paid search, search engine marketing

Posted by Antony in: Search