Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) all have benefits and drawbacks associated with them. We setup 5 campaignes on each using the same parallel keywords for each campaign on each PPC program:

Ex. "mesotheliomia research lab locations" for our health web site campaign on AdWords. Also, "mesotheliomia research lab locations" for our health site campaign on AdCenter as well as YSM. So the 5 campaigns in AdWords started with the exact same keywords as the 5 campaigns in AdCenter and YSM.

The setup for Google AdWords was far superior to the competitors. AdCenter and YSM appear to have paid more attention to usign the latest and greatest SOAP, AJAX, and whatever other overhyped technologies they could find to implement their control panels. Many times during campaign creation, AdCenter and YSM crashed. Each program reviews your selected keywords but AdCenter and YSM actually banned some of our keywords. AdCenter banned 80% of our keywords while YSM banned 60% of our keywords. Very frustrating because you have to respond in a very short amount of time or your campaing will be deactivated until the words are deleted.

The minimum amount needed to start an account with either system is $5 which makes them very affordable, even for small web site owners. With each system, you have to bid on keywords. The minimum bids are as low as 5 cents. NONE of the 5 cent bids were ever active since each system will warn you if the bid is too low to actually receive a click. We changed all our bids to $0.10 for our comparisons. We had to limit our campaigns to US and Canada although almost any country/region can be targeted. We noticed very quickly that Google AdWords allowed Chinese Bots to chew up your budget in a matter of minutes! AdCenter and YSM would have probably had similar results but we did not feel like losing any more money.

Google AdWords, by far, rotated our ads more than the other two services combined! A large number of impressions do not necessarily translate into money, but it does allow you to see that your ad is actually rotated on the internet. Google has much better stats reporting than AdCenter and YSM and you can see where you clicks came from and where your ads have been shown. AdCenter and YSM are catching up a little but still have a lot of work to do to catch Google in this area.

YSM gave the best CTR of the three for our campaigns. The results were not mind blowing, but a winner is a winner. AdCenter was second and Google finished a close third. Google gave us more clicks (visitors) than YSM, but that is because AdWords gave us many more impressions than YSM. CTR is not really anything that translate into money for your web site.

CPC and the rate at which you get conversions are probably the most important stat to you and your web site. Cost Per Conversion is the cost you paid to convert that click (visitor) into a customer. The best case scenario is I paid $0.00 for my new customer. This is impossible but you want to get as close to $0.00 as possible. YSM provided the best conversion rate, then AdCenter, and following up the rear was AdWords. The rates for Google AdWords is probably lower again because of all the impressions and clicks you will receive from AdWords.

Our conclusion from this study shows you should employ all three of these programs to promote your web site. If you want visitors quickly, AdWords wins hands down and should be implemented for your site(s) first. If quality visitors and better conversion rates are more important to you, YSM and/or AdCenter will be the better choices for being implemented first. If you really do not care about small gains in quality clicks versus high visibility, we would recommend implementing the programs in the following order:

1. Google AdWords
2. Yahoo! Search Marketing
3. Microsoft AdCenter

---

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Email

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment