Affiliate internet marketing

Adwords or Overture which is better? The result may surprise you.

Overture is Yahoo’s equivalent AD display and back end management system.
In truth, Overture was a search engine in of itself at one time. Some users may still remember it as go.com

Amongst online marketers ad agencies and others, there is this oft repeated question, “which is better ?…”
Google’s Adword or Yahoo’s Overture ad management system.

Well there is no doubt that at the moment, Google’s management system is significantly better despite Yahoo having had just as much time to get their system up and sparkling.

Significantly better… but what does this mean and if i said, significantly better, I would expect a few of you out there to say, significantly better for what and for whom.

Ahh, now we are getting down to the crux of the matter.

For straight up analysis and backend reporting, I doubt that i will get flamed ( much…) for repeating what many technical adcopy and ad agencies already know. The Google backend system is tops. In the sincerest form of flattery, it is the de facto standard and everyone and their brother who runs a search engine and is selling traffic is either attempting to emulate, reverse engineer it or using it as their benchmark in terms of the feature set and analytical tools.

So, does this mean its very, very good - this backend management system?

Well that’s an opinion and not easy to answer definitively. Google’s adwords management has benefited from an incredible amount of usage and finetuning. Google’s internal usability testing also appears to be significantly better than that of most other fortune 50 web companies. So the ad management backend has become the system to beat as a benchmark and has stayed that way for quite some time.

Many long time users who are pay per click specialists could give you a quarter dozen very valid ways of improving the Google Adword system, so it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is well thought out and quite the formidable 600 pound gorilla in this arena

I digress here, but if your company sells an instant gratification product and you knew for a fact, that you rarely if ever received sales between 3pm and 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, perhaps you might turn off your advertising during that time or at the least tune it down significantly. Why, then is it that Google only recently allowed you to see this, and why is it that you still need to do a highly customized report to even easily see this type of trend.

Ahhh, well, some might say, its because the search engines really did not want you to know this level of detail …

All this “shadow confusion” did, was to give room to 3rd party groups like Atlas to build a better mousetrap, ha ha.

But, does the fact, that the google adword system in general have the upper hand over Yahoo’s overture system mean that Acme’s widgets should use this in preference to Yahoo?

Most Pay per click specialists would wisely tell you as a customer.

Test them both, because experience has shown us that its a different set of customers ( demographically ) who use google vs. yahoo.

I have visited this topic once before in this blog and my results then showed that some decision makers appear to inhabit the Overture spectrum and thus several of my customers who were B2B ( Business to business ) had conversion rates on Yahoo that were more than 250% better than Google.

In contrast, a particular customer who ran limousine services seem to do so well from google that there was no persuading this guy to spend one single penny on Yahoo.

In truth, unbeknown to this customer, I tried just to see what might happen and it flopped. Overture would not convert well for this type of business.

So, the answer to this question, is still not black and white.

So, today, you’re about to say, hey buddy since you haven’t given us any really new information why bother waste our time.

Well, I am here to tell you that from November 2007 thru to June 2008, many of my Overture Results have outgunned, outrun, outmanned, outmaneuvered my google adwords by a factor of 1-300%.

After scratching my head for a while and digging around in my campaigns to find out what had gone ( wrong ) or right, i came to the conclusion that a significant number of advertisers bidding on the overture terms had simply gone away, leaving bidding at an all-time low for many of these terms.

So, where had my bidding buddies gone? Well, over to Google of course - i think, hey well i didnt go over there and really check… but what i know is that they are simply NOT in overture!

Check out the Google vs. Yahoo financials over the last quarter and see if that doesn’t bear out my theory.

Google has done such a fine job of branding that every Tom, Dick & Harry ( Apologies to Tom and Dick and Harry ) thinks that they absolutely have to be on Google.

Well, my boss says we have to be on those google ad thingies to get the first position so that’s why i am gonna do…

Well, it could also be that too many of us are tired of using the rather anemic yahoo ad management interface… and it could also be that if any of you were running ads last year this time, you would know that ads promoting retail products did extremely well while b2b business offers going into the XMas season did quite pathetically for many of us.

It could be all of these reasons, a combination or perhaps none at all, but if you are currently running overture ads and google ads, go and check your own results. Depending on the industry that you are in, you may be in for a pleasant surprise.

As of February 2008, I would certainly review moving a significant portion of my B2B advertising back to Overture simply because it appears as if the sheep have done the opposite.

And for the uninitiated, you never want to get into a bidding war with the sheep. So, the less bidders ( sheep or otherwise ) the better the chance of getting a reasonable or outright low bid for your very valuable keywords.

Btw, sheep always think that they need to be in the number position. Or sometimes its the sheep’s BOSS who thinks so, but in any case, you never want to get into a bidding war with the sheep, it just too rarely ever pays.

So, Overture/Yahoo has finally put a better management system into place and things are hopefully… looking a little better for both Yahoo and their ad customers.

As an update it appears that after Yahoo and Microsoft fell out of love, Yahoo has made a deal with Google that will give Yahoo another 450Million annually in advertising Revenue and hands Google 80% of the ad market online.

Since the users of both systems will not necessarily migrate from one system to the other, what I wrote above still holds true.

Adios.

Comments on Google vs Yahoo on Flash and seo.

I saw the following in my email, and thought that the writer below had some good thoughts on pay per click advertising. But on reading further it was obvious that some parts of what was being discussed was misleading and fairly opinionated ( read non-factual ) . The author was saying that Google’s search bot has no ability to read or decipher a site made entirely in flash. Thus concluding that one should never build sites with flash. While there was some truth in that statement before, it is not true at all, and one needs to be careful about saying never, especially when it comes to Google and technology.

Using flash judiciously along with rich text formatting is in truth the methodology best suited to building sites that will be appealing to both search engines and users.

The part of the post that i take great exception to is where our friend attempts to categorize Google and Yahoo. He says that Google is business to business while Yahoo is mostly for consumers. My own adwords and Overture campaigns campaigns say that this **fact** depends on the sector being discussed.

In general, I have said before that Google’s popularity can work against it.

People use Google to research everything. Those researchers who have very little intention to buy or subscribe to products will click on the paid ads at the top and the right side of the screen. This click action is particularly prevalent for the number 1 thru 3 pay for click listings.

So, Click, click, Click - Kaching in the Google bank account. Even competitors will occasionally click, click, click to research what their market sector is doing and to intentionally run up the bill, particularly when the click is a 3-10 dollar click as the first position in a highly competitive area can be.

So, lets look at Yahoo. How does the googling help your Yahoo ad results.
Well, it stands to reason that if more research is done on google, that less research is done on Yahoo, right? Perhaps, but that statement neither defines nor truly aids in the resolution of the problem.

Studies ( yep with real stats ) using real money on the same ads in both google and yahoo have shown that people interested in the same market segments, when using both engines, appeared to respond differently when searching for the same item. For B2B ( Business to business ) we frequently saw less research and more action occurring in our yahoo ads resulting in consistent $35 conversions in Yahoo vs $54 in Google after all the tuning could be done - 2007. Note this was before Yahoo’s latest set of changes which allow even more tuning.

So, our opinions, on this, differ strongly from that of the author who wrote the text below ( More pointers for a good search engine listing ).

While none of us may be entirely correct, ad campaigns run on both search engines do seem to consistently show that the sectors that do well on Yahoo or Google consistently outperform on the particular search engine platform that they do well on. Demographics of the searching audience, increased competition on Google driving the adword pricing up? Perhaps a combination of these and more.

So for limousines and taxi services my Google ads outgun Overture consistently while many of my business to business ad-campaigns on Overture outperformed my similar Google ads by a margin which has to be seen to be believed.

Below is the email that i received a little while back.

More pointers for a good search engine listing

Worse, website designers are still building sites with Flash. Flash is great. Flash is startling. It looks terrific as all those images come cascading in a blizzard of light, shade and colour. The only problem is - guess what? - the robots can’t figure it out. They are puzzled, bemused, unable to grasp what is going on. The result is that they go somewhere else, probably to a site where the designer has laid everything out on a simple plate for them.

Until the search engine programmers figure out a way to write algorithms that understand Flash presentations, the simple, no-nonsense, text-based sites will continue to win hands down. And by that I mean they will continue to win good listings. Which is the object of the exercise.

To be fair, however, the great majority of web designers have no abiding interest in search engine optimization. They figure that their job is to build a site that is both attractive and interesting. It is therefore up to the site owner to lay down a few rules when commissioning a build - no Frames, no animated gifs and, above all no Flash.

Is Google really the greatest?

And finally, folks, a word about the search engines themselves.

Everybody wants to get a good listing on Google. To them, Google is the be all and end all and that there really is nowhere else to be. What they tend to overlook is that the so-called lesser engines are equally good at pulling business if they are fed properly.

I have a client who receives 80% of his Internet business (which is substantial) via Yahoo, on which he is No 1 for all four of his search terms. Google does very little for him. Why should that be? It’s because, when you get down to it, Yahoo is a consumer-oriented engine and Google is predominantly a commercial or business-to-business engine. And his business is geared to the consumer market.

I know that many seo elitists will take issue with me about the efficacy of this statement. So be it. But I will get my retaliation in first by saying that (a) their argument will have to be damn good to convince me and (b), I don’t really care what they say.

My own comment on this is that, its very difficult for the average user to discern what is real and not real when there are so many passionate half correct seo consultants publishing information that appears correct.

For the longest time a desperate customer could get an unethical seo person to literally spam (via blackhat techniques ) yahoo and get away with it. Though yahoo might disagree with me, at this time 2008, I think its still possible to spam yahoo and msn and to a large degree, get away with it. Doing the same with Google requires more work. Enough work that, one might as well just do it the right way.