Yahoo is running a promotion where, if you pay a $5 deposit (which unlike Google’s is counted against your clicks) they’ll give you a $25 advertising credit. That is a real no brainer, so I signed up for it. And it was pretty immediately apparent why Google is kicking Yahoo’s hindquarters:
- Google has much, much, much better web-based tools to quickly get in variations for your keywords. For example, “second grade sight word list” plugged into Yahoo’s tool gets only variations on the plurals. Google picks up second graders, etc, and also some words which are syntactically connected but are *not* variations of the words in the query. Which is great because those words are cheaper than anything as nobody is targetting obscure teaching terminology… except me.
- Yahoo will always display your full URL people get taken to (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/info.html?source_tracking=yahoo). Google displays whatever you want it to display (http://www.yoursite.com). One of these is obviously a lot more comfortable for the customer.
- Google makes new ads easy. If you’ve already got one ad in a keyword group, throw in another and Google will rotate them for you trying to find the one that gets clicked on most. Yahoo, not so much. You have to go through the whole setup process again.
- Google will have you up in minutes *if* your ad text doesn’t trigger any of their filters (e.g. no guns, no gambling, etc). My original text did (bingo is apparently a gambling word) but I got the exemption I requested within 24 hours. Yahoo will have you up and running in 72 hours.
- Google AdWords comes with Google Analytics, which is a) worth keeping an AdWords account running for even if nobody ever converts from it, because it beats whatever web stats software you are currently using hands down b) is the perfect tool for an information junkie and c) lets you know whether all that money you’re spending on the ad campaign is actually making you money. Yahoo… no such tool, but we play well with Google Analytics, if you go through hoops with tagging URLs which we actually display?
I like Yahoo much moore than Google .
Really.Yahoo see moore links.
I wish to yahoo have moore users.
I was using Yahoo For 5 Months.I didn’t see significant results.I will change To google.I think that google has many more users.
ya i think google is much better publisher program than yahoo
When you compare YSM to Adwords you realize fast that Google does it best! With Yahoo you can’t set to get traffic only from yahoo searches. In fact most clicks come from fraudulent yahoo partners’ domains. You have to pay fake clicks in order to learn about the bad domains and then block them. What a daily pain! You can block up to 500, which is too low. You often need to contact Yahoo in order that they manually block some domains cause the feature isn’t working that great and of course while waiting you are charged! You hit the 500 maximum really fast and it seems to have different networks of fraudulent domains for all types of keyword niches. So it’s far from being enough and far from being fair. With Yahoo you can’t block IPs. You can’t block searches from other devices such as consoles and cellphones. I could continue listing all that Yahoo’s lacking all night long. People who have success with Yahoo does cause their keywords aren’t targeted by the network of fake clickers.. But from our experience, soon or later fake clicks spread on more and more keywords. You block a domain, there are 10 new ones.. it just never ends! Good luck!
I have been mostly using Google ads and they seem to work fine for me. Never tried Yahoo. Interesting comparisons!!
Im sorry Patrick, but you sounded like google’s mouthpiece on this article. Did they pay you for writing this?
Im sure anyone who is serious about internet advertising would want to know the actual meat & bones differences, not google’s pretty little extras. For instance,
1) Advertising on Yahoo has got to be more affordable than Google.
This seems like common sense to me, both are bidding individual keywords. More bids = higher price, etc.
2) Google has come under a lot of fire lately (not enough imo) due to their utter and incomprehensible unethical behavior on how they manage their adwords system.
Google “slaps” thousands of advertisers every day, rendering their advertising efforts useless. You want to advertise something that poses possible competition to google or one of their pretty little products and you can kiss any business from google goodbye. They will drop your quality score so low, your ads wont show, regardless of your bid amount. Then when you call someone to try and figure out what the $%^$ is going on you get the wonderful message “We’re sorry we cannot provide phone support for all ad-words accounts. Please visit our help forum.”
Spledid – So you visit their forum and post with your problem…… GOOGLE NEVER REPLIES. Its always some other ‘preferred advertiser’ that is blessed enough to receive phone support from the google gods. And his reply is: “Try putting your keywords in your meta tags and descriptions as well as the landing page.” Really? Wow. Amazing. I could go on for hours about this… but I have gotten off track.
Google also slaps millions of other advertisers who aren’t even competing with them.
Advertising on Yahoo may become a better idea as more and more flock to Google. Google pricing is going to reach a saturation point where paying more for clicks is not going to be worth it. For example if you have $1000 budget and both Yahoo and Google can send you targeted eye balls for the full amount, how does it matter where people come from. Its only cost that matters.