Yahoo vs Google Adwords

I have been trying to use the Yahoo Panama System for a few months now… As a UK customers, I am sadden and skocked by some of the functionality that has or has not been included. Main targets at this moment are:

1. Geo Targetting, what is the point of this if I still have to set up separate accounts in separate countries, with Google Adwords, you just say where you want to advertise
2. Multiple Accounts, if you have multiple account in multiple countries it is a nightmare getting from one area to another, who thought up this navigation, The Google Adwords Client Centre is what is required.
3. Printing, has anyone tried to print out a report more than 1 page of A4, yes it just gets lost as the AJAX cannot cope with page breaks.
4. Time issues, if your advertising spend is roughly 70/30 Google/Yahoo, why do we have to spend 30/70 of our time on Google/Yahoo.
5. Keyword management – anyone found a place to manage their keywords all together? Google it takes seconds Yahoo do not provide this facility to my knowledge, in the name of advanced features.
6. Estimating tools – As per the Webinar presenter problematic effort at showing us how traffic estimators work, these only work if you have enough traffic in the proceeding 7 days to work it out. You try finding enough traffic for a keywords such as ‘customise mobile kitchen’

Enough of that lot, I can think of many more…

I signed on to the Quality Score Webinar, I was not impressed, a lot of my questions were badly answered, the Webinar presentation itself was aimed at people who knew nothing about basic terms like what CPC stands for. The biggest issue I had however was that this new system is clearly bias to larger clients with bigger budgets. I shall try to explain.

If you have a large budget you can easily set the bids high (to combat poor advert copy), this will mean you get closer to the top position quicker – fine, if you also have a good quality advert, you’ll do even better with a bonus, even though you have a large bid you will not pay that ‘full price’ you’ll get a discount. So the message is bid high and work on the adverts later. If you are a large company with a large budget – well, you also have enough budget/manpower/time to work on those adverts. So all in all good news for big budget advertisers.

If you have a small budget say £30-50 a month, well you cannot afford to bid high. You adverts are your only chance of ‘doing well’ However that means you need to spend time, create test adverts, using the optimisation tools, adjust settings and so on… you need to ‘play’ with all aspects of your account to get a decent result – but, if you have a small budget there is no point in spending hours working on this. It does not make sense to spend upwards of 4 hours a week trying to spend £30 a month.

Putting this in prospective, it is much easier to advertise with Google. Entry clients have to make a bigger investment from the start making it harder for them to justify the costs. Traditional Yellow Pages for example costs £3-500 a year, £50 a month on Yahoo costs £600 a year. It is more expensive.

This is a synopsis of what I have said to my clients regarding Yahoo: Management of Yahoo Accounts has significantly increased to the point where I have to triple their ‘management fee’ (the fee I charge them to manage a yahoo campaign), to make Yahoo a continuing viable concern for me to manage their account for them, they would now need to budget £100 per on the Yahoo Account. It simply is not viable for them to continue using Yahoo through me unless they increase their budget. I also added the following points: the profitability of Google Adwords remains high enough not to have to use Yahoo at all; I strongly believe that we are better off using more than 1 PPC service i.e. not just Google; and Yahoo although produces fewer results actually produces better quality results. Their over whelming response has been, we are happy to stop using Yahoo and just use Google, i.e. spend the existing Yahoo Budget on Google. Not a single one of my clients has opted to raise the budget to a decent level, and finally 1 of my larger clients has said they would like to stop using Yahoo.

The clear message is that Yahoo is not important enough to their advertising to merit the extra work.

I am still evaluating yahoo, I would still like to get my accounts sorted out, but I really need to pass the message back to Yahoo that despite all the advanced functionality of the new system it is far to complex, time consuming and ultimately does not merit the limited returns it produces.

I am currently seeing my business with Yahoo dropping considerably, unless something is done about the system. Quite honestly I would like to see the system rolled back to the old one, or a choice of system being given to clients at the least. The two systems have been running side by side for some months now there seems little reason why this cannot continue.

All comments welcome!