When we talk about marketing in today’s society, it is no longer about billboard signs or 30 second radios spots. To reach the larger audience you need to market where people or going and the internet is where you can get your bang for the buck. When marketing on the internet you want to get your ads where people are on the internet. Google and Yahoo have one of the highest hit rates on the internet and for any business or corporation looking for exposure those two sites are the place to be.
Both of these are exceptional websites to starting your marketing campaign. Both have pros and cons that will meet everyone’s needs. How you choose what is best for you is a personal decision but in the end you should meet your marketing goals.
First I will tell you a little about both of these services that are provided by Yahoo and Google. Yahoo is a suite of several online marketing tools, including sponsored search, local advertising, and the Yahoo.
I will give a brief detail of similarities and differences between the pricing schemes of both Google and Yahoo. First, let’s start off with the similarities between the two. They both offer what they call PPC “Pay Per Click” service which is an advertising program that involves a payment to the host each time a visitor clicks on a link that leads it to a vendor site. Pay Per Click programs, PPC or Pay For Performance are terrific ways to extend your business reach beyond your city and even state. The growth in web traffic generated by pay per click services is a marketing option to be seriously considered.
With PPC, you only pay each time a web viewer chooses your ad listing link and clicks into your website. Pay per click targets a specific audience reaching up to 85% of all internet users in a cost effective and immediate way. There can be as much as a $20 return of investment for each $1 spent. Each program has its unique twist on paid-placement but both work on a basic auction format in which advertisers are invited to bid for clicks from specific keywords or phrases.
With Google AdWords, you are billed for clicks after they have happened several times a month in $50 to $500 billing increments as you develop a click and payment history. With Microsoft adCenter (yahoo sponsored search), you are billed for clicks after they have happened in a 30 day billing period.
When it comes to minimum charge per click each company has their own pricing scheme. Google Adwords has a $.01 minimum, but if you want to get you company noticed where a large portion of the population will see your ads you should expect to add a considerable amount more if you want to compete with other individuals competing for the same business. Sponsored Search listings on Yahoo start at a minimum $.10 per keyword ($999.99 max) and each bid is set to a value $.01 above your very next competitor. If Company A bids $1.00 for a keyword listing and Company B bids $.50 for that same keyword, Company A will be listed in the first search position at a $.51 value.
When looking at the similarities between the two online giants they mostly follow the same guidelines so we jump into the differences between the two.
Companies that market to different regions, countries, or languages will have greater difficulties using the Yahoo program. Google offers more extensive and precise options for global targeting. Google enables local businesses to target a market area by specifying a radius from a business location or by mapping out irregular areas by latitude and longitude. The reason for this is that Yahoo Search Marketing requires a new registered account for each. This becomes quite a hassle to control and establish. This is especially true as Yahoo Search Marketing will not allow for bulk uploads of keyword list (such as a spreadsheet of keywords) until you have established an account with their company and have a consistent revenue stream going back and forth. Search Marketing keywords also take quite a while to pass through their approval procedures so this can be a discouraging proposition.
Another big difference between the two are Yahoo Sponsored Search gives you significantly more ad space than AdWords; enough space to really say something to sell your product effectively or to run one ad instead of many. Google AdWords has very strict standards on spacing and presentation. You may only have 25 characters in your title for example and 35 characters each in your 2 subsequent lines. Yahoo Sponsored search uses Google’s character counts but allows you to have 70 characters in the single description field which they will break into two lines. Additionally, some products will have trouble being approved to show on the AdWords network due to their strict Web site content standards. With Yahoo Sponsored Search you may have 40 characters in your title and 75 characters in your ad description including spaces as well as the opportunity to create a long version ad that will show on some content sites. So depending on what you desire to put in your heading can determine which PPC service you would utilize.
Next, I will discuss the Google network. According to the Google website, “The Google Network is a large group of websites and other products, such as email programs and blogs, who have partnered with Google to display AdWords ads. Advertisers have the option of running their ads on Google as well as the Google Network for no extra cost”. The Google Network has two components: the Search Network and the Display Network.
We already touched on the search network with Adwords but let’s take a closer look at Google’s display network. Google’s Display Network is a simple, cost-effective way to advertise on millions of high-quality news pages, topic-specific websites, and blogs. Google has partnered with global media outlets and niche publishers alike to create the largest online advertising network in the world. AdWords advertisers can either hand-pick specific sites or use Google’s powerful targeting technology to place ads on the pages most relevant to their products and services, thereby expanding their marketing reach to targeted audiences all over the web.
When setting up a campaign to market a product, placement of your ad is very important to getting your ideas out to the consumers. This is where content placement becomes invaluable. Placements are locations on the Google Display Network where your ad can appear. A placement can be an entire website, a subset of a website (such as a selection of pages from that site), or even an individual ad unit positioned on a single page. There are two types of placements: contextual placements and managed placements.
Contextual targeting means that the search system automatically starts by looking through every possible page in the Google Display Network to find content that matches those keywords. AdWords takes contextual matching down to the page level. If a placement has many different pages, only those pages that match your keywords can show your ads.
Managed placements are specific ad placements in the Display Network where you'd like you ads to appear. Managed placements ensure your ads appear on specific placements you've chosen. If you further restrict your network ad delivery to "Show ads only on pages that match all selected targeting methods," your ads will show only on the specific sites where you want them to appear. Your ads can appear only on your chosen placements, and only when pages on those placements also match your keywords.
In closing we discussed similarities and differences between the pricing schemes of Google AdWords and Yahoo!'s sponsored search. Also, we discussed the Google network, and how do search and content placement work.

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