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Some Differences Between Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

Geotargeting:
Let's say you're in the service business, like our customer LBJ Flooring. You want to display your ads, but only in geographic areas that you serve. For instance, when people type in "hardwood floors" in Southern California, our client want their ad to appear... but if one types in "hardwood floors" in Maryland, our client does not want their ad to appear, as they can't service that far east. Make sense? Well, it sure makes sense to Google and AdWords, as through "GeoTargeting" they allow users to configure their ads to a specific region or location. This is much better than Yahoo's ads, that will appear almost entirely to a US and Canadian audience. If your AdWords account is set to a wider audience than that, consider tightening it up. You may also want to consider creating an additional campaign targeting just your home state. While the traffic will be significantly lower for this campaign, the conversions should be considerably higher.

Exact Matching:
Google's and Yahoo's matching options vary considerably, especially when it comes to term-stemming. For example, if you exact-match a phrase on Google (put the phrases in [brackets]), your ad will only show to searchers typing that exact phrase into a search engine. However, Yahoo's version of exact matching (their default style of matching) will also match your term to phrases beyond the exact match using their Match Driver feature. This includes matching your ad to common misspellings, plural and singular versions of the term, and the use of the term in conjunction with common words like "the" and "of." Also, Yahoo's "enhanced matching" feature will match your ads to terms where the searcher's words appear in your title and description but weren't necessarily bid on by you.

Broad Match Variance:
Yahoo's definition of broad matching is matching the individual words in a search phrase to searches containing all of the words in any order and anywhere within the searcher's given search phrase. For example, a broad-matched ad on the term "LED lighting" could appear when someone searches for "lighting for my home LED lights." (For more info.) AdWords will provide the same match as Yahoo does in the above example, but will go a step further with their expanded matching feature. Expanded matching will cause your ad to also display on terms Google considers to be synonyms, related phrases, and plurals. (For more info.) It's certainly possible that Google doesn't know your business and your prospective customers as well as you do, so consider tightening up your campaign by using phrase and exact matches. If you'd like to keep some terms wide open, consider only doing so with search phrases containing at least three words to prevent your ads from being overly matched. Additionally, with Yahoo and Google, if you're using anything other than exact matching, it's important to include negative keywords (Google's term; Yahoo calls them Excluded Words) to prevent your ads from matching on irrelevant or poorly converting terms.

Competitive Bid Influence:
Google's choice to use broad matching as the default matching option (listing your search phrases without "quotes" or [brackets]) has caused frustration for newbies, but has also had a painful effect on experienced pay-per-click advertisers. While you may have worked hard to research hundreds or even thousands of redundant search phrases relevant to your web site, newbies may be setting up new campaigns where they've inadvertently broad-matched themselves into competition with your ads. This can drive up your per-click cost on some terms where you may have little to no competition on Yahoo. Not much can be done about this, but it's something worth noting.

Landing Page Choices:
Yahoo's system forces you to create a specific ad for each search phrase you place in their system. By default, this often leads to higher ad quality because advertisers are more likely to write unique ads for each search term. It also increases the odds of advertisers to send visitors to the most appropriate landing page on their site for specific keywords. For example, your college offers a variety of different programs for students. When someone searches for a specific program you offer, you'll generally see higher conversions if you send that visitor to the appropriate program page rather than the homepage, forcing them to dig for the same content. There are two ways to address this in AdWords. Create additional Ad Groups with a tighter grouping of search phrases, or assign unique URLs at the search-phrase level. (For more info.) A combination of both strategies will provide the highest performance along with the most detailed tracking data for stats analysis.

These are just some of the differences in the leading Pay Per Click companies.