Adwords vs. Overture

Hello all - newbie here,

I have a question that is a bit more strategy based. My main competitor is utilizing Adwords and ranks very high naturally through SEO on Google. They completely ignore Yahoo Search, but do rank well in the SERPs on Yahoo.

I am just starting out and will be competing with them. I will be utilizing PPC, but wanted to know whether I should start directly competing with them at Google or take advantage of the fact that they don't use Yahoo Search Marketing?

Which would you do first? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

thanks,

I would do a test across both. I say this because you will still rank high enough on ppc (even if you are below them) to pick up traffic.

The spend will obviously affect your success, as will your pricing and whether you are competitive with them or not.

I would try going for longer key words phrases, misspellings and long tail terms, as well as aggressive, top-tier keywords seperated into separate adgroups and test it for a time frame. Keep all the adgroups 'exact' rather than broad or phrase, and be sure you have kw specific landing pages if possible with as many kw's as you can. Send the rest to your homepage.

Don't worry about chasing the top 10% as it sounds your competitor is doing, you can get as many conversions from the 40-90% for less money.

Then test MSN next, then Yahoo.

GaryTheScubaGuy

In your case, definitely start off with Yahoo. YSM is known to have good quality traffic on many categories. You may also want to check out MSN Adcenter.

Do you have a good budget for PPC?

I'd ignore the competitor at first, and try to figure out what you can afford to pay for a click on specific keywords. An easy way to do this at first (you can fine tune it for each keyword once you have some data) is to figure out:

Conversion rate for product
Net margin for product (not including PPC costs)
Required Return on Marketing Costs

To break even on your marketing costs figure out how many clicks you need at what price:

PPC Marketing cost= Number of clicks * Cost Per Click

Orders = Conversion Rate * Number of Clicks

Net Revenue = Orders * Net Margin

If you want 100 clicks, with a conversion rate of 3% and a net margin of $5 you could figure out the cost per click (what you can bid) by:

CPC=Conversion Rate x Net Margin

CPC= 0.03X$5

CPC=$0.15

Cost for PPC for one sale in this formula works out to $5, which is your break even point.


If you want a 200% return on your investment, divide the CPC by 2.

Once you have your Max Cost Per click, you can use Yahoo, MSN and Google. You'll want to go slow at the beginning. Crucial to the success of this formula is accurate conversion rates. They will vary depending on search engine, ad content, PPC rank, and keyword... as well as time of day and many other factors. Managing a PPC campaign well isn't easy. It can be very time consuming. The return on time spent on a well managed PPC campaign can make it very worthwhile.

At the beginning, I'd suggest starting slow and finding your lowest conversion rate and base your bids on that.

Knowing your maximum bid is far more important at the beginning than deciding which PPC engine to use. It's far to easy to dig a hole with PPC.

I have actually had much better results with YSM over Adwords for less $. I am in the process of pulling back on Adwords (especially do to the poor customer service there), maybe even to $0. I already stopped content ads on Adwords as they were totally useless where as the YSM content ads are much less shown they still also have a better conversion, but still not as good as the search ads.
I need to look into MSN.