Adwords vs Overture

Spend More with Which?

[ffctas]

Hi,
I currently outspend adwords vs google 6 to 1.
CTR, cost per click and conversions are about the same for each.

Is this consistent with what others have found. Am
I underutilizing Overture?
Thanks
tom

[skibum]

Our spend ratio is about the same, maybe not quite so AdWords heavy across the board. Conversion rates tend to be lower with AdWords but that's where the volume tends to be.

[fabfurs]

We spend double on AW than on OV but Overture converts 35% better than AW for our product.

** AOL consumer demographics fit our product profile really well.

[anallawalla]

Fabfurs has it. Demographics.

I just plotted three months of conversions for Adwords and Overture. Adwords is consistently pulling 2x to 3x the conversions from Ov.

[eWhisper]

demographics is a huge key.

i've got services that do 3x better on OV b/c of Yahoo
and products that do 3x better on G

know thy audience

[hobbnet]

It's simple...

Spend more with whoever is making your company/website more.

[perlcoder]

Adwords 3 to 1 Overture

[RedWolf]

Mine is around 10 to one in Googles favor. The main reason is that good CTR bumps my low CPC terms up to the top, often G-Spot, positions. On Overture the pure CPC ranking has them in 8th to 20th position. I would have to double my CPC or in most cases increase my CPC by six or seven times to get the same positioning in Overture. That's just not profitable, so I leave it more or less dormant. I figure whenever they do there next price increase and increase my grandfathered bids to 10 cents or more, I'll drop them completely. Conversions from Overture are lower than Adwords even when I do a test bump on a word to get it in the top three, so POI really tanks.

[Macro]

often G-Spot positions

Oh no! It looks like the name I posted in jest - G-Spot - is becoming common usage for Premium listings :-)

[mcavic]

The main reason I've never gotten into Overture is that their site is so darn slow. Is the customer interface leaner than the home page?

[javahava]

I also spend about 6-8x more on adwords than on overture. It seems to me that overture is losing a lot of business because of its $.10 minimum bid; if their minimum bid was like adwords, I'd spend far more total cash. traffic quality seems about the same to me for both.

i wonder if there's any chance of overture going back down to $.05; or do you think perhaps adwords might raise to $.10? if i was in a PPC engine's shoes, though, the $.10 minimum bid doesn't really make sense because it seems there's a huge market for advertising that's only sustainable at around $.05 (e.g., small/startup businesses, affiliate advertising, etc.); bumping up to $.10 would erase that revenue, and leave a lot of search term inventory unsold. anyone have other thoughts?

[Tropical Island]

Is the customer interface leaner than the home page?

NO!

[smokey sterling]

This is interesting, we have previously been spending way more with Google but recently decided to split the budget evenly because the conversions were much better with overture. either this, or google sales are becoming harder to track -- i noticed that our log files are not reading the google search strings as well as it used to, say a year ago. overture on the other hand is very easy to spot and thus track to a sale. the problem is, if the stats are right, about 80% of all se referrals come from Google, so they are kind of necessary.

[smokey sterling]

oh yes and regarding the slowness of google vs overture -- google has a major problem with timing out when you select "include conversion data" for a report. overture's main problem is that you can only get data for the past 90 days. the rest is gone forever (as far as i can tell).

[CalArch90]

6x more on OV. Let's face it, conversion rates are the bottom line, and OV has superior CRs.

I mainly use G for brand exposure. Their ad setup is good for this. Also the content ads allow for thousands of impressions at little cost, and there is no minimum click-thru requirement.

When I check my logs, I notice most clicks from the Google content partners are from good quality sites such as the New York Times, About.com, etc., so I'm happy with the traffic I'm getting.

Why Overture converts better is an interesting question. Could it be better distribution partners? Could it be that OV's age cohort is older than Google, and therefore users have more disposable income?

Not sure, just putting some questions and possible explanations out there for discussion.

[smokey sterling]

CalArch --
our products are not regular consumer items so i don't think i can attribute it to disposable income. Age also doesn't factor into it much. Like I said, more of our click-ins are from Google, but more sales are from Overture. I have seen speculation that Overture's searchers may be more buying-minded than Google's, but aside from that, maybe their ad layout is more conducive to click-thru by qualified buyers than Google's? If you don't know how to use your negative keywords, you might get a lot of bad click thru from AdWords, especially since they force you to use "AdGroups" and you can't really customize text for every individual keyword as much as with Overture. Also, Overture is much stricter with relevance guidelines. With Google almost anything goes. Hmmm... maybe that's the answer?

[CalArch90]

Smokey,

These are all good points. I actually ran a very aggressive campaign in terms of limiting my keywords to only highly relevant words, using the exact match feature, writing a specific ads for each keyword, etc. and still did not get the conversions I get from Overture, even though I invested considerably more energy in creating the campaign with Google.

Before I became an advertiser, and was just using the search engines for searching and surfing the web, it always seemed to me that the layout overture has is easier to use and cleaner than the ads on the right. So I started out with OV and had good results. I heard so many good things about Google's Adwords that I decided to give it a try. Just didn't get the conversions I was looking for.

I don't mean to get down on Google, it's a great company and arguably the best search engine out there. It is also a very ethical company and, I actually think their layout has a lot to do with keeping the ads on the right side separate from the search engine results, so they actually look like ads. When Yahoo and other portals that use Overture place the sponsored listings on the SERPs, it is difficult to distinguish them from the standard listings even though they are labeled as such. I'm afraid though, this layout probably hurts the results on Google.

Also, in all fairness, a lot of web masters get better results from Google, so it is probably a good idea to try out both and see which one works better for you. There are alot of factors involved, the market niche you are in, the cost per click which can sometimes be much higher on one than the other.

I actually find that bidding on Google invetably requires higher bid prices than Overture in my niche. I think this probably affects results. It used to be at one point that Google was cheaper to bid on, but that doesn't seem to be the case as it has grown in popularity.

I'm actually trying out some of the second-tier pay per click engines: Findwhat, Enhance, etc. and I'm finding that results so far are better than I expected. Clicks are very cheap on these ppc's, in particlular Enhance, so even though conversion ratios are not as good, the cost to conversion has actually been pretty decent. I guess you just have to experiment and find what works best. Each niche is different.