New To Overture. Why such low CTR compared to Google?

Doesn't make any sense.

[Soze]

I put an ad in the same location for the same site as it is on Google, yet my CTR is 15x lower than on Google. The ad is at the top and in the second position. Same with Google. Competition is not an issue here.

I can't beleive that the habit of Yahoo users could be so different.

[jcmoon]

Google goes own over 50% of the market share, so more people will see your Google ad. However, I am not sure why, but Yahoo users don't convert as many conversions or clicks for that matter.

[deep_alley]

Well if this was number of clicks/impression being 15x lower, that would be okay. But here you are talking about CTR. Doesnt make too much sense to me. Have you seen your listings on yahoo search as they would appear to users? Long ago I noticed that if I put full stops in my listings, my ad would get cut and only 1 or 2 lines before the full stop would show. I now use commas instead of full stops.

[olgerdviz]

They cut the ad anyway if it is longer than 2 lines when appearing in the right side of the search results page. My Overture CTR are a bit better than AdWords', but the number of impressions is like thirty times less.

[Soze]

My impressions were around 1000 yet the ctr is about 2%.

On Google my impressions are also in the 1500's yet the ctr is 30%

Where the heck are they showing these ads that no one is clicking? On yahoo it is at the top of the blue box. Very first one.

I don't understand what is going on here.

[deep_alley]

Yup I know what you are talking about olgerdviz, but this cuts it before the 70 characters limit. And I am not talking about the ads on the right. Its the top ads in the blue box that get cut.

[BinaryMan]

It really depends on the keyword and your ad. There are some differences sometimes between how it is displayed on the two engines which may affect CTR (but should not be as much as you said). I find that now matter what I am doing or what position I get on Google, I can't get even the 0.5% minimum CTR. However, for most of my activities on Overture I am able to get 1-2% CTR on most of my keywords with similar ads even when not in the top spot(s). I got tired of the Adwords algorithm because I didn't want to have to get a high CTR to pay reasonable CPC prices or try to get #1 spot to recuce the price; it's a bit more consistent with Overture and you know what to expect in terms of your positioning (in most cases).

[inbound]

A theory:

On your terms it may be that a much higher percentage of impressions on Google are from actual searches in comparison to Yahoo showing mostly on their 'search network'.

If you consider that some ads on the Yahoo search network often appear as a result of pre-defined searches on very popular sites (even to the extent of big money terms being the default on any page on file sharing sites), it's not difficult to see a very low CTR.

We have had direct experience of this problem on a different network. Very low CTR's is a red flag for your adverts being shown somewhere innapropriate (at best). I'd be very wary.

[rise2it]

Unless something has changed that I don't know about, you have no control over ads also appearing on Yahoo's 'partner' sites.

If that's still the case, you can imagine the quality of some of these 'partners'.