Is Overture Overcharging?

Shouldn't Adwords have more clicks than Y!?

[southernmost]

I have created identical ad campaigns on Adwords and Overture, but am amazed that the Overture campaign has cost twice as much (reporting more impressions and click-throughs).
Doesn't Google have more search traffic, and therefore should have higher stats...especially impressions?

[Tropical Island]

Do you have content clicked in Overture?

If you have search only then our experience is that Over (Yahoo?) delivers far fewer clicks than AdWords.

[southernmost]

I do have Overture's content active, but it accounted for a fraction of the monthly clicks. Here are last months stats:
Overture $75 with search, $3.50 with content
Google $58

If the campaigns are identical, shouldn't Overture yield smaller stats?

Another strange thing is that overture is charging me more with far fewer impressions: Overture had 39,000 impressions, while Google shows 87,000 impressions for the month.

[awardmasters]

Your samples are too small for comparison. Even if you are paying $0.10 per click on Yahoo, that is only 750 clicks per month or 25 clicks per day on average. At that level there can be great differences.

Also, whether Yahoo or Google gets more clicks and/or more conversions depends a great deal on your particular market.

[Turkish]

You will find the the keywords with less traffic will generate far more clicks on Overture than Google. We use the keyword tool on Overture, find the "lesser" used phrases with about 30 plus searhces a month, which is cheaper. We then makesure we are top in the listings for these phrases and get the traffic off these searches. However, on Google these would be far too expensive or even inactive to use.
This does seem to push our Overture expenses over Google in some instance.

[southernmost]

Thanks turkish for relaying your experiences.
I'm still not so sure everything is kosher. I have the same phrases active on both Adwords and Overture at around the same bids. I just don't see how so many more people are searching for my phrases on Yahoo than on Google.
But i'm small potatos, so I'll not freak out about it. But whenever I feel the urge to spend more on PPC, I'm thinking of putting more money towards Adwords. It seems not matter what budget I use for overture it sells out, and Google doesn't (which seems to be more honest behavior).

[boplicity]

What's your ROI with yahoo vs google? Answer that, or you'll just be wandering around in the dark.

[kona]

southernmost, from what you're saying it appears that you are not tracking your visitors. You can't run an effective PPC campaign without tracking, otherwise you'll be in the dark even for very simple matters as where your visitors are actually coming from, let alone things like which keywords result to more conversions, ROI metrics etc.

[southernmost]

i can't figure a way to use tracking for my business. there is no shopping cart, and all of my customers inquire through e-mail or phone.
any suggestions on how to track roi in this scenario?

[bateman_ap]

Do they have to come through to some sort of "contact us" page to get in touch, if so you could put some code that google provides (as do overture i think) that tells you how many people visited that page. It won't be perfect as people won't call etc but at least it is a start

[southernmost]

no, there is no contact page. each page has it's own e-mail link...plus the toll-free phone number is on each page.

[BinaryMan]

I do notice that they can't multiply correctly. Since when did 8 clicks at $0.11 = $0.90? That's what it reported to me the other day...

[JefferyD]

I started a campaign 2 weeks ago on both Overture and Google and Overture has already brought me 87,000 impressions, about 90 clicks and 2 sales. Google has given me about 4,500 impressions, 5 clicks and no sales.

Two things seem to be going on here. From what I'm seeing on the Google forum, they are having major difficulties with new campaigns starting in January and that seems obvious looking at my own experience.

The other problem you haven't mentioned is placement. I have an inexpensive product competing with $40,000 products for the major keywords. When I bid 80 cents for a keyword on Overture, I'm usually within the top 2 or 3 positions. That same bid on Google often leaves me buried on page 3 of the results. Hence, fewer impressions, fewer clicks...

[ccam96]

Binary..

It appears that Google works with fractions of a cent , probably to account for two advertisers with the same bid and different CTR's , so you probably were charged 0.1125 for each click. I've seen this on many of my terms.