Anecdotal: Google Adwords vs. Yahoo Sponsored Search
March 23rd, 2007I’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:
- I’m paying way too much for Adwords (partially true at least, witness the decline in my cost over the month)
- Adwords is better at promoting my expensive keywords (possibly true)
- For whatever reason, Adwords commands a higher price (definitely true)
- YSS is a much better deal (seems to be startlingly true!)
- 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
Hi Antony, it’s good to see YSM performing well. I don’t think the demographic swing is generally strong enough to show these kinds of disparities, though. Although it is quite true that Yahoo performs quite well on some kinds of retail.
I have to think that with a few tweaks, the Google campaign could be brought up to speed. Happy to take a look, no charge! :)
- Andrew
Andrew Goodman | March 27th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Interesting that it was possible to get 50% more impressions on YSS than Adwords. My visitors, in Canada, seemed to shift en masse to Google a few years ago, so maybe you do have a special demographic. The lowest bid of $0.03 on both platforms puzzles me, as Yahoo says $0.10 minimum. With real estate web sites, the CPA seems to be the reverse of your experience, which could also be demographics.
Max Anderson | April 2nd, 2007 at 5:38 pm
When you compare YSM to Adwords you realize fast that Google does it best! With Yahoo you can’t set to get traffic only from yahoo searches. In fact most clicks come from fraudulent yahoo partners’ domains. You have to pay fake clicks in order to learn about the bad domains and then block them. What a daily pain! You can block up to 500, which is too low. You often need to contact Yahoo in order that they manually block some domains cause the feature isn’t working that great and of course while waiting you are charged! You hit the 500 maximum really fast and it seems to have different networks of fraudulent domains for all types of keyword niches. So it’s far from being enough and far from being fair. With Yahoo you can’t block IPs. You can’t block searches from other devices such as consoles and cellphones. I could continue listing all that Yahoo’s lacking all night long. People who have success with Yahoo does cause their keywords aren’t targeted by the network of fake clickers.. But from our experience, soon or later fake clicks spread on more and more keywords. You block a domain, there are 10 new ones.. it just never ends! Good luck!
unlimited | October 7th, 2009 at 6:20 pm