Grudge match between the two PPC services

Yahoo has announced its new pay-per-click product: Yahoo Search Marketing (SM). This product was formerly known as Overture, but you may also recognize it as Goto.com, the name it went under prior to 2001. In our experience, advertising with Google AdWords has resulted in higher conversion rates than with Yahoo Search Marketing (SM). However, both programs have advantages and disadvantages. How does Yahoo SM compare with Google's AdWords? Let's start by looking at how they differ (all amounts below are in USD).

Bidding

Yahoo SM

• Yahoo places your bid at 1 penny over your next lowest competitor. Thus, if you bid $3.00 per click, and the next highest bid is $1.95 per click, you will only pay $1.96 per click.
• Yahoo allows you to see who you are bidding against and what they are bidding, so you know exactly where you will rank, and how much you will pay.
• Yahoo's maximum bid is $999.99
• Yahoo's minimum bid is $0.10

Google AdWords

• Google doesn't tell you how much you will pay per click. Thus, if you bid $3.00 per click, you will pay anywhere from $0.05 to $3.00 per click.
• Google does not allow you to know how much your competitors are bidding per click.
  An advantage with Google is that you will rank higher if your click-through rate (CT rate) is better (a CT rate is the ratio of clicks on your ad to the number of times your ad is shown). Thus, you may have a better rank than your competitor, even if he or she bids more than you (because of your CT rate).
• Google's maximum bid is $100.00
• Google's minimum bid is $0.05

Low CT rate dropping

Yahoo SM

• Yahoo will drop your keyphrase if the CT rate is ranked very low for a significant period of time. In actuality, this rarely happens. Your keyphrase has to perform quite dismally for it to get dropped.

Google AdWords

• Google drops keyphrases with POTENTIALLY low CT rates. If Google deems that your keyphrase has done poorly for other customers, then your keyphrase won't even get the chance to make a single (first!) impression. This can be very frustrating when your keyphrases are very relevant, but Google won't even let them see the light of day. The flip side, of course, is that if your keyphrase's CT rate is good, you will get a higher ranking (even if you bid lower than your competition).

Showing ads by country and language

Google AdWords

• Google allows you to choose your country and language by selecting them in a dropdown box. Very simple, very efficient, and very effective.
• The language is based on the language setting of the visitor's computer. For example, if you are targeting Spanish Americans, than you will want to target the Spanish AND English languages because many Spanish Americans use English computers. Just make sure that you choose Spanish-only keyphrases.

Yahoo SM

• Yahoo's system for countries and languages is downright miserable. You have to re-register for every country (and only twenty countries are available).
• Worse, you have to re-submit all your keyphrases and reset all your bids.
• What's more, each country has different criteria for submission. This means you have to rebuild your campaign for the USA, UK, and Australia. Canada is there, but you are not allowed to submit English keyphrases (?!?), only French (FYI: Canada's workforce is 73% English, 22% French). In Switzerland, you can submit in Italian, German and French; there is no language differentiation.
• Notable missing countries: Mexico, China, English Canada (which is grouped with the USA), South Korea, India, Russia...

Reports

Yahoo SM

• Yahoo offers many useful reports. And while you can find just about everything you might need, it's left up to you to figure out which report contains the information you were looking for.

Google AdWords

• Google offers customizable reports. You can ask for anything you want, and you will get it.
• They also offer to email you your customized report on a regular basis.

Keyphrase comparison

I have bid on some keyphrases from February 1st to April 30th, and held them in similar positions during that time. These numbers are for search related impressions only. These campaigns were not involved in content advertising.

"Okeeffe print(s)"
#3 position

Yahoo:
1 click
8 impressions
12.5% CT rate
$0.10 cost per click  

Google:
63 clicks
1,642 impressions
3.8% CT rate
$0.13 cost per click

"Ansel Adams photo(s)"
#5-6 position

Yahoo:
20 clicks
2,401 impressions
0.8% CT rate
$0.05 cost per click  

Google:
25 clicks
2,529 impressions
1.0% CT rate
$0.06 cost per click

Conversions

Our client February Point counted emails + contact forms as conversions. Here is a comparison from February 1st to April 30th.

"Real estate Bahamas"
#3 position

Yahoo:
1,037 clicks
19,879 impressions
5.2% CT rate
$0.34 cost per click
3 conversions
0.30% conversion rate  

Google:
1,557 clicks
35,348 impressions
4.4% CT rate
$0.45 cost per click
13 conversions
0.84% conversion rate

Clearly then, Google AdWords is a better choice if you are interested in clicks, impressions, and conversions. If you want the lower cost per click for the same position, it would seem that Yahoo is the better choice (though conversions are lower).

Competition

- FindWhat is possibly the third biggest pay-per-click (PPC) search engine, although there are a few that might be its equal: Kanoodle, GoClick, 7Search, Search123.
- E-spotting is very big in the UK, and competes heavily with Google and Yahoo in the PPC marketplace.
- MSN is getting ready to launch its own PPC engine to compete with Google and Yahoo(MSN currently uses Yahoo SM on its site). No date yet, but watch out for it.

Overall

To sum up, you will definitely have more control over your money with Yahoo's system. It is more open and honest, and you will pay less per click than with Google's system. Google does not tell you why you are paying what you are paying, but it does have the added bonus of rewarding you with rank for a better converting ad.

Of course, Google does get more traffic and it converts better than Yahoo, and in the end, isn't that what we're all looking for? Thus, Google should be the winning choice for anyone that is looking to convert clickers into buyers. Because after all, who doesn't want to increase their sales?

Blogging for SEO

Using frequent posts to drive the search engines to your site.

It's no secret that blogs are great for helping to boost your seo rankings. You can use a blog to get a new site ranked quickly and ahead of your main site if you are dedicated to posting on a frequent basis.

While the main goal of your blog may be to express your thoughts, talk back to your customers or as a vehicle to promote your product or services, there is another critical element to blogging.

Search Engine Optimization & Marketing.

Because of the frequency of active blogs (daily - or at least 5 times a week) the search engines have put high weight on blogs that are focused and tend to stay on topic.

It's the freshness of content (in a perfect world) that a search engine is craving and rewarding to the blogs. The ideal situation is that the blog would provide for tiny snippets of information that over time build up to a greater whole.

But the most overloooked element of a blog is that once you've established a frequent pattern of posting and you have the Googlebot coming to your site every few days, you can then use that to link to other sites, sub-domains or any deep links that you need to get crawled. While most blog postings may not have direct links to any sites in particular, you could always format your blog with some permanent links on the side.

Another mistake made by the amatuer blogger is that they don't realize that you can optimize your blog. True, most blogs only have a few areas, namely the "home" page and the "archive" page. But depending on the tool being used to post the blog, there are some places where you can take advantage seo-wise.

The title of your blog should be thought of as a headline - grab the reader's attention - but also be sure that your blog title is also what gets archived - that way your titles can become search queries as well.

While the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don't forget to take a little time for SEO and you should see your efforts payoff in the search engine results pages.

Google Base Optimization

Google Base happens to be the only shopping search engine which allows merchants to define their own attributes (optional fields).

It is also formerly known as Froogle, and if you have any product that can be sold online, you have no excuse to not use this service. It's free, and Google is trying to promote it's usage.



If you want better results on the shopping engines, try optimizing your feed - it?s no longer good enough to just post all your products and expect your listings to be found.



There is a new opportunity that can be had for online retailers, and it's known as the "Onebox" result. To learn more about this great way to drive targeted traffic, visit Marketing & Advertisement, a fantastic blog that covers all angles better than I can.



Recently, Google made more requirements on a generic level, but there may be more if you are within a specific product category:

• brand


• condition


• description


• expiration_date


• id


• image_link


• link


• price


• product_type


• title

Understandibly, some merchants are upset at this since they have thousands of products that now need more information, and some products may not have all of the required fields (expiration date, for example).



So how can you take advantage of this?



Some people will search by color, some by material and others by style. All of these are fantastic opportunities to get your product in front of a consumer who is ready to buy. It will take some time to create and get all the tweaks worked out, but it is well worth it.