Google Vs. Yahoo Search Ads
I usually use Google search ads for my business, but I decided to try Yahoo! in parallel for a while. After some admittedly brief and narrow experience, I think the various metrics of search engine market share are understating Google's lead (supposedly Google has about 50% and Yahoo 20%). Here are the number of impressions I got for roughly the same 2 days and same set of search terms and maximum bids:
Yahoo: 175
Google: 3132 (search only)
Google: 74,000 (search + content network)
Neither account hit a budget limit on these days. Of course this might change with the nature of the search given different demographics in the user bases. An academic term would likely get more on Google than Yahoo, proportionately.
No point here, just interesting. I really was kind of shocked how pathetic the Yahoo numbers are.
Eddie:
I think Yahoo's long-standing and consistent attempts to expand their business into a homepage/internet portal conglomerate has accomplished one major thing: people no longer think of Yahoo first when they want to search for something.
November 4, 2009, 2:11 pmMichael:
Google's search engine still leave much room for improvement. I wanted to compare government orders of vaccine for bird flu to swine flu. I searched "Bird flu vaccine orders" and the results dropped bird and returned results with swine. Same thing with names. You look for John Smith and you get John Adams and Adam Smith.
Google seems to bring back a lot of noise in its search results.
November 4, 2009, 10:20 pmMartel Firing:
My two cents -- I just received one of those class action suit envelopes offering me crumbs for being ripped off by Yahoo. I threw it away as I always do with those things. Oddly, I don't remember booking ads on Yahoo.
But I did spend a small fortune on pay-per-click ads on Google. My impression is that at least a third of the clicks I paid for were the result of fraud. I traced back a lot of these clicks and found that they originated on web pages that had been composed by Google, itself -- essentially parking and mistaken-entry traps. There were literally dozens of these useless, fake pages, and that's where an abundance of clicks were coming from. It is inconceivable to me that legitimate web browsers would be sending me traffic from these dummy pages.
I experienced even worse results from another pay-per-click service. This service gave me a lot of traffic, but then actually continued to debit my account for clicks after it was turned off!
The lesson is to be skeptical about results from any of the pay-per-click services.
November 5, 2009, 10:23 am