I decided to split up my previous blog post to pull out the pricing thoughts from the point of view of us, Perceptus Solutions Inc., who’s primary online advertising campaigns are for print-bingo.com. We sell Premium access to our web based bingo card generator for $10. At that low cost, we have to be careful with what we bid on for search engine advertising clicks.
Technically, we have ad campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter. I say technically, because we spend about 20 times more with Google than we spend on YSM (formerly Overture) and Microsoft AdCenter combined.
If you search on Google for various bingo card terms such as “bingo cards”, “print bingo cards”, “bingo sheets”, and about a hundred other terms you will probably see a Google AdWords ad for print-bingo.com. Don’t click on it, it’ll cost us a nickel. :)
Yahoo Search Marketing has a minimum bid on any search term of $0.10. At 10 cents per click, it is debatable whether or not there is a positive return on investment. Thus we are highly selective with the terms we bid on. Because of this, we pay very little to Yahoo every month, in exchange for very few visitors.
On the other hand, Google has no minimum bid, and we can thus bid on a lot of terms that we don’t bid on on other networks. We pay for hundreds of clicks every day on Google and we definitely get a return on investment on those clicks.
To YSM and Microsoft: not every search term is worth $0.1 a click. We would literally spend 20 times as much on advertising with YSM if the minimum bid was closer to $.05.
Tags: advertising, adwords, google, yahoo, ysm
February 4th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
[…] life of a micro-sized geek company « Chinese New Year Bingo cards – in Chinese (sort of) Google AdWords vs. Yahoo Search Marketing, a perspective from the low-end. […]
February 27th, 2008 at 12:27 am
[…] wrote in a previous post about advertising pricing that Perceptus would spend several times more on advertising if the $0.1 minimum bid was reduced or […]
October 7th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
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!