Google adwords beats overture 10 - 1 conversions?

For our niche market which is sporting goods items, our google adwords outperform overture at about 10-1.

Anyone else have this similar results. I am considering cancelling the overture ads and putting the money into something like bizrate.

Anyone have any comments or advice.

Outperform in terms of CTR or overall sales?

There are lots of factors influencing CTR including rank, ad appearance and placement differences between the two programs, demographics of the respective search engines' user bases, etc., but the most important difference for me has been that AdWords rewards good ads in their ranking whereas Overture's open bidding process drives up bids to ridiculous levels that don't pay for themselves nearly as well.

Since by changing programs you'd be foregoing about 40% of the searchers in the universe (and hence 40% of your target market), consider making some changes to your ads to see if you can improve their effectiveness.

- Josh

I noticed the exact opposite phenomenon for two campaigns of ours - Overture sent us fewer visitors, but nearly 3X as many sales... I'm not sure why this happens, but I have to assume a combination of demographics and how the ads are appearing.

Do you mind saying for which topics you saw this? I'm curious. I've had the impression that Yahoo is more consumer oriented, Google more techie (among other differences). Generally I've had better luck with Google for my clients which tend to be more technically oriented.

Agreed. I'm curious...do you have a sense of CTR for similar ad positions on the two respective programs or know of such statistics out there? In other words, do ads for the same term and in the same position translate into consistently different CTRs for the two search engines? This would reflect how successful the search engines are at getting users to click on ads through their different interfaces and ad lengths.

Google - skews richer, urban, younger & male
Yahoo! - skews poorer, more rural & suburban & female
MSN - skews older and suburban
AskJeeves - skews British & Canadian

Just know your market and go for it. At SES NYC, a Comscore Rep explained that despite Google having a larger share of the market, Yahoo! actually gets more searches per day for Nascar, WWF & related terms - the SE demographics skews are heavy.

Indeed, we have found a gold-mine in Yahoo for the sub-prime market.

Without knowing the product details, it is very hard to compare. Could you please share with us exactly what kind of Sporting Goods?

Thanks!

We tend to have the opposite effect in our business. We pay alot for Adwords, and average around $25 per conversion (which is very good for us). With Overture, we average around $14 per conversion.

If speaking of natural links, MSN is really starting to impress us. I hope they can come up with an advertising model that trumps G & Y both.

Randfish

Thanks for the demographic info on yahoo. The nascar, wwf, type of person is part of my core cutomer base.

Thanks

Last thing I heard from a serious PPC research group was that MSN skews toward women, specifically housewives.

Dave