New Adwords Strategy

Flawed logic?

[johnnydequino]

I use both Adwords and Yahoo/Overture for PPC. For some odd reason, I spend 4 times as much on Y! as Google. Not sure why - from my understanding google/partners have 60% of the Internet traffic so what am I missing?

Anyway, I am doing a test. I moved all the keywords from one category from Y! into one campaign on google. I seto up the keyword as three to test:

widgets
"widgets"
[widgets]

I also doubled my PPC on google then on average for Y!.

This way I am guaranteed to get simular traffic on Google then Y!

To my surprise, Yahoo/Overture generated two times the impressions that google did.

Am I missing something?

jd

[eWhisper]

First off, just because you're using the broadmatch of widget, doesn't mean that you're actually broadmatching the term:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Overture uses an advanced matching feature (which you can enable or disable). This system examines keywords for syntax variations & misspellings(widet, wideting, widgets, widdgets) and then matches up the search with the phrase (you'll almost always have less keywords in OV than in G).

Overture also has better control of how 'stop words' are handled. A search for 'widget and greens' might not trigger your exact match ad [widget and greens] on Google as often the system doesn't handle these words correctly and displays 0 ads. When most

When you take into account demographic targeting, Y & Gs audience are different. For some products, Y has more search volume than G does. G does have AOL as a partner, which is similiar traffic to Y - however, AOL doesn't get nearly the traffic Y does to make up for this disparity.

[johnnydequino]

eWhisper - would you say Googles and It's parters (GOOG 35%/AOL 10%/ ASKJ and Properties 5%) get 50% search traffic?

I don't use advanced match on Y!. So comparing my brand new campaign on Google to Yahoo should be apples to apples considering googles broadmatch is not in effect.

So it's surprising that Yahoo would generate three times the impressions. Not only that, very disappointing.

I guess I am too logical of thinker to really understand Adwords. I have always spent 4 times more on Yahoo than Google and to this day I can't explain why.

P.S - I even have a higher CPC on google than Y! by 50%. To me, adwords does not have any logic.

jd

[eWhisper]

would you say Googles and It's parters (GOOG 35%/AOL 10%/ ASKJ and Properties 5%) get 50% search traffic?

Statistics can be manipulated to show anything. I don't like quoting statistics as no two traffic reports will show the same thing. I go off of what I see in log files, etc - and not always what internet traffic reports say.

I guess if you're really going to compare numbers, you also have to compare why those numbers happen. The first step is display patterns.

Switch your monitor to 600x800 resolution and do a search on Yahoo. Do you see anything that's not an ad? Repeat the step for Google.

You can even keep switching resolutions and see what these pages look like.

This is why Overture CTRs are much higher than AdWords.

I think maybe you should compare impressions across OV & G to see the difference in clicks vs impressions in determining traffic level differences. In that same regard, are you showing for page 1 on both PPCs? Are your average positions similar to each other?

[johnnydequino]

Actually, I think overtures click through rates are higher than googles because it's a text link, and the descriptions are longer - in my opinion of course.

I think what may be tripping me up is the (Or/And/The), the noise words.

If I have a exact match for:

[red widgets]

The red widgets will not show.

But for broadmatch, I guess right now on google this is not showing?

Google should really include a match for exact match on this with filter words excluded.

jd