Throughout this article I will compare and contrast the three giants Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and the freshly launched Microsoft adCenter in order to shed some light on the unique aspects and features of each platform. I will cover three main areas of each platform consisting of ad distribution, demographics and tools. When you have completed reading this article you will possess the knowledge required in order to make an informed decision on which of these marketing platforms is the most beneficial for your company to launch a successful PPC campaign.

Google AdWords

Google Adwords is currently the most popular of the three advertising platforms. They continue to develop new tools and features that secure their footing upon the top of the PPC Marketing podium.
Ad Distribution:

The Google Network consists of thousands of web properties including search sites, content pages, email services (Gmail), newsletters and discussion boards. According to Media Metrics Data 80% of internet users in the United States will view an AdWords ad within the next month. You may choose to show your ads on the search network the content network or perhaps both depending on your custom needs. A few of the search sites that your ads will appear on when utilizing the search network are Google network consist of Google, AOL, Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves), Amazon and Shopping.com. Several examples of where your ads will appear when advertising on the content network are HowStuffWorks, New York Times, Washington Post and Forbes.

Demographics:

The Google AdWords system allows you to target users in several different ways. You are able to target users by specific locations or by specific languages. This is achieved by determining a users IP address, search query location, internet domain or the users set language preference.

Tools:

Google AdWords comes equipped with a robust toolbox that can streamline your PPC campaign management.

The site exclusion tool allows you to block your ads from appearing on any sites that you feel may be irrelevant or inappropriate for your advertisement. The keyword tool grants you the ability to help you improve your keyword lists, estimate your individual keyword traffic or find new negative keywords. You may add your new keywords directly to your selected adgroup or download them to your computer.

You can best utilize the traffic estimator by utilizing it to estimate your position based on your max Cost-Per-Click (CPC), your daily spend, impressions and clicks as well as your keyword status. The My Chang History allows you to view any changes that have been made to your account within a particular time period.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) is the pioneer of PPC advertising and a global leader in commercial search services.

Ad Distribution:

The Yahoo Publishers Network is a collaboration of web properties consisting of search web sites, content publishers, email clients and more. Much the same as AdWords you may choose if you would like to show your ads on search or content sites. Several of the search sites that make up the Yahoo! Publishers Network are Yahoo!, Excite, iVillage and Sympatico. A few of the content sites include Advertising.com, CNN, ESPN and National Geographic.

Demographics:

The Yahoo! Search Marketing platform in my opinion trails the pack when talking about audience targeting demographics. The option available to you are very basic, however Yahoo! makes up for it with their Local Sponsored Search options.

Local Sponsored Search allows users who have a brick and mortar location to participate in gaining business from internet users who prefer to research online but purchase locally. Local Sponsored Search allows you to target visitors by a specific territory or service area up to a 100 mile radius.

Tools:

Conversion Counter is Yahoo! Search Marketing’s tool to help you measure the conversions of your advertising campaigns. Simply install a small segment of code onto the conversion page of your web site. Yahoo! breaks the stats down into information that is truly useful for your online marketing success.

Easy Track helps you in distinguishing web site and search engine traffic that result directly from your Yahoo! PPC Campaign.

Search Optimizer automates bidding strategies based on your keyword performance history. Yes, this tool does have it’s time and place but is still no substitute for manual optimization of your PPC campaign.

Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft adCenter is the newest competitor to the PPC advertising arena. Although there are still a few glitches that need to be ironed out adCenter has the potential to be a real competitor.

Ad Distribution:

Unlike the previous two PPC platforms we have gone over Microsoft adCenter only facilitates advertising throughout the MSN Search Engine. There is still potential that your ad will be viewed by a large audience, 40 million people per month to be precise. Out of the 40 million people who utilize MSN search 93% shopped and 81% of them made online purchases in the US. I feel that it is safe to say that we may also expect adCenter’s ad distribution network to expand over the next several months.

Demographics:

With the Microsoft adCenter you are able to find out who the searchers are, identify their geographic location as well as time of day information. adCenter takes the time of day information to the next level with targeting of ads by day of week as well as a precise time of day. The adCenter platform is the first of the PPC search engines that gives you the ability to target a select age group and even the gender of the searcher can be determined. The age and gender targeting feature could come in very handy depending on your product or services. MSN is able to provide such precise targeting demographics by pulling their information on individuals from Microsoft Passport accounts. What that means is anyone out there who has either a Hotmail account or a MSN Messenger account is easily trackable.

Tools:

adTracker is a mechanism used by Microsoft adCenter to track all clicks from ads served throughout MSN Search. adTracker measures the effectiveness of an ad by tracking which clicks result in a web site visit.

Bid Boost is a very interesting tool that is exclusive to Microsoft adCenter advertisers. The Bid Boost tool raises the value of a bid by a preset percentage after it recognizes that the individual is from your optimal user demographic.

In conclusion as you have read through this article you can see that there are pros and cons that come along with each one of these PPC advertising platforms discussed. The goal of this article was to arm you with a few facts that lend a hand in helping you to deciding on which PPC advertising platform is the most beneficial for you to launch a winning advertising campaign that produces highly qualified relevant traffic at an optimal return on investment.

How about a sure-fire way to absolutely dominate your competition in the Google AdWords game? Focus on your landing page. It IS the landing page, stupid…and many companies have stupidly taken the advice of so-called Google AdWords experts and played the game all wrong.

While your competitors are focusing on things like keyword research, writing good ad copy, attractive headlines, and worrying about what to bid on keywords, YOU should be focusing on your landing page. Oh, yes, focus on the other aspects of running a successful Google AdWords campaign, but never lose focus of the most important piece of the whole puzzle…your landing page.

So what is a landing page? Let’s start by defining what a landing page is not. A landing page is not the home page. It COULD be, but in most cases we have found that the best page in a website for the customer to “land” when they click on your ad is the page that has the information that the searcher was looking for.

For example, if you are a legal firm that offers a wide variety of services, and a prospect types in “accident attorney” doesn’t it make sense to send that prospect to the page in your website that talks about your services for accident victims? What if you sell all different types and colors of widgets and your prospect types in “green widgets”, would you send him to your home page or to the page that has pictures and pricing of the green widgets that you sell? Duh.

In fact, having the wrong landing page is perhaps one of the most common mistakes that newbies and (unfortunately) the “pros” make. I challenge you to do a search in Google and click on some of the ads that display for that keyword and notice how many times you end up on a page that has absolutely nothing to do with what you searched for. Chances are that you will have to do some clicking around to find out exactly what you want. Not good.

There are also ways to take advantage of captivating the searchers attention by using a little “keyword magic” on your site, where the keyword that the prospect searches for is automatically inserted into the headline. For example, let’s say that someone types “defense attorney” into Google and you had bid on that keyword. Your ad appears, the prospect clicks on your ad, and they land on your website. Now imagine a huge headline that says, “Looking for a defense attorney?” The prospect is now overjoyed because they easily found exactly what they were looking for.

But in the next moment another prospect types in “malpractice attorney” and your ad appears because you offer those service as well. When the prospect clicks through to your site they see a headline that says “Looking for a malpractice attorney?” Same site; same landing page, but different headlines. Wow! With the proper tools and the right expertise, this “magic” can easily be accomplished.

There are other things that must be done to a landing page in order to help you get more conversions. A few of them are as follows:

1. Keep it simple. Remove anything that would distract your prospect, such as excess navigation links.

2. Have a clear call to action. If I had to guess how many websites using Google AdWords have clear calls to action, my guess would be about 2-3% of them. Trust me. LOTS of money being wasted here.

3. Judicious use of audio or video on the landing page. Using audio or video you can easily satisfy requirement #2. Not only can you give your visitors a sense of warmth, but you can tell them exactly what to do in order to contact you so that you can help them.

Of course, there are MANY more things a proper landing page should include, but you are starting to get the picture. Proper Google AdWords campaign management may begin with good research and a good ad, but that’s not where it ends. “It’s the landing page, stupid,” and if you are having trouble, then get professional Google campaign management.

In this article I will lay out some of the features of each one, and hopefully this will help you determine which suits your business best.

Using the Yahoo Search Marketing program, the first thing you’ll notice is that you must pay an upfront fee to cover the cost of your initial advertising expenses. This sometimes scares a lot of new or novice Internet marketers, because without having even received any clicks, they have to fork out some money.

If you do manage to sign up and get over the initial fear, you will notice that the Yahoo Search Marketing program is a bit difficult to use. Play around with the tool and familiarize yourself. It is no doubt that after you compare the conversion and/or the search results from Yahoo with that of Google AdWords, you will quickly opt for the latter.

With Google AdWords, there is no initial upfront cost other than the verification of a small refundable deposit to your bank account to ensure that you are a legitimate Internet marketer. The Google AdWords platform is simple to use. By typing in your desired search terms and bidding on your cost per click, and setting your daily maximum ad campaign limits, it’s all here. And one of the best things about Google AdWords is that it is located on the largest search engines in the world. You will quickly notice that although conversion rates may be low at first (you may need to work more on selling your product on your squeeze page), however much traffic can be routed to your website if you have a slightly higher budget to start with.

So which is better, Google or Yahoo? If you’re still confused, just give both a try. I’m sure you’ll agree that Google is the way to go if you are looking for quicker success.

One concern expressed by clients employing a service to handle their Google AdWords PPC advertising is the question of spreading campaigns too thinly. For companies and businesses dealing in multiple ventures, especially, are aware of their budgets and interested in maximizing pay per click ads to the best use, while at the same they want to be certain the money is spent wisely. When you consider how companies budget advertising in other media, the realm of online advertising offers a bit of diversity, and it can be easy to get lost in multiple campaigns.

When to Consider Multiple Campaigns in AdWords

Say you operate a retail business specializing in collectibles. Between trading cards and action figures, plush toys and autographs, you have a wide range of keywords on which to draw when planning online ads. A general ad for your collectibles store may not attract the level of traffic you desire when you consider that collectors will use the Internet to search for specific objects, so in this case it is good to have different campaigns highlighting your products.

• Sports cards
• Sports memorabilia
• Plush toys
• Dolls
• Movie memorabilia

On the other hand, if your business is limited to two primary purposes or products, there may not be a need spread out your advertising dollars. The owner of a camping store, for example, may wish to focus on ads detailing camping equipment in general, as customers searching for these items are apt to buy several different things for a trip.

One Ad Per Keyword?

In order to retain high quality ratings in Google (and consequently lower bid prices on desired keywords), PPC managers will keep keyword bids as close to the ad text as possible. The more relevant the keywords are to the ad, naturally the less you will be charged as Internet users click through to your site (or a landing page tailored to your ad). This may beg the question: how detailed should your keyword lists be? Going back to the sports collectibles example, if you only deal in baseball cards, do you want to split your campaign into several ads, each representing a different team:

• Atlanta Braves keywords for an Atlanta Braves card ad
• New York Yankees keywords for a Yankees card ad
• and so on…

In the realm of PPC advertising, there really are no right or wrong answers, as each company must tailor ad plans to suit their budgets and other needs. The best recourse is to experiment with campaigns and ads, monitoring closely to see where the successes happen. The more you learn about how AdWords can work for you, the better return on investment you’re likely to see.

Google AdWords is an awesome way to drive traffic to your website and can provide you with a lot of leads and sales, but it cane be very expensive if you don’t know what your doing! That is why I want to show you exactly how to cut your AdWords costs in half and still make a massive profit!

Secret #1:

Get rid of all the keywords that are not making you money or giving you qualified leads! How do you do this? Simple – Start tracking your conversions and seeing which keywords are generating newsletter subscribers.

If you find that a certain keyword is not giving you newsletter subscribers, then delete that keyword from your system. Chances are if after a few hundred clicks that you have not gotten a sales you never will! So pull the trigger and delete the keyword.

I have used this strategy over and over to cut my costs by well over 50% in most markets that I run AdWords in!

Secret #2:

Stop running your ads on keywords that are not directly related to your market. For example, if your in the dog training market then don’t bid on keywords like “dog”. It is way to unqualified… You have no idea what that person is thinking about when they type that keyword in.

For all as you know they could be looking for a music group or something. Just because a keyword gets a lot of traffic does not mean it is going to make you a lot of money. It could very well cost you a lot.