Overture vs. Google AdWords
Plus The Secret Powers Of Search - High Rankings AdvisorThe article by Ed Kohler of Haystack In A Needle breaks down some of the major differences below and identifies variable which can cause differences in performance between campaigns on Overture vs. Google AdWords.
In summary:
1. Geotargeting: If your AdWords campaign's location targeting is set wide open, you may be paying for traffic with a very low chance of converting to leads.
2. Language Targeting: Overture defaulst displays ads almost entirely to an English-speaking audience. AdWords account can be set to display ads to a broader audience - tighten settings to improve conversion..
3. Ad Syndication: What percentage of your traffic is coming through content targeting compared to search engines on AdWords? While clicks from content-targeted ads can and do convert to leads or sales, a person clicking through from an ad on a web site is not
as qualified as a person who is actively searching for the services or products your business offers... this varies considerably from one industry to another. Advises: Consider turning off content targeting for a test period or comparing your conversions rates from search- vs. content-targeted ads.
4. Matching Variance: Google and Overture use various matching options. Different results are most prominent with exact and broad matching, where AdWords' broad matching is a bit broader and exact matching is more exact.
- Exact Matching: For example, if you exact-match a phrase on Google (put the phrases in [brackets]), your ad will only show to searchers typing that exact phrase into a search engine. However, Overture's version of exact matching (their default style of matching) will also match your term to phrases beyond the exact match using their Match Driver feature. This includes matching your ad to common misspellings, plural and singular versions of the term, and the use of the term in conjunction with common words like "the" and "of." Also, Overture's "enhanced matching" feature will match your ads to terms where the searcher's words appear in your title and description but weren't necessarily bid on by you.
If you did your keyword research using Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool (which rolls up the plural and singular terms into the singular version), then used that set of phrases to set up your Google Adwords account, you may have inadvertently skipped some of the better plural
version converting versions of your important search phrases.
- Broad Match Variance: Overture's broad matching matches the individual words in a search phrase to searches
containing all of the words in any order and anywhere within the searcher's given search phrase. For example, a broad-matched ad on the
term "LED lighting" could appear when someone searches for "lighting for my home LED lights."
AdWords will provide the same match as Overture does in the above example, but will go a step further with their expanded matching
feature. Expanded matching will cause your ad to also display on terms Google considers to be synonyms, related phrases, and plurals. He suggests tightening up your Google campaign by using phrase and exact matches. To keep some terms wide open, consider only doing so with search phrases containing at least three words to prevent your ads from being overly matched.
With both Overture and Google, if you're using anything other than exact matching, it's important to include negative keywords (Google's term; Overture calls them Excluded Words) to prevent your ads from matching on irrelevant or poorly converting terms.
5. Competitive Bid Influence: Google's choice to use broad matching as the default matching option (listing your search phrases without "quotes" or [brackets]) has caused frustration for newbies, but has also had a painful effect on experienced pay-per-click advertisers. While you may have worked hard to research hundreds or even thousands of redundant search phrases relevant to your web site, newbies may be setting up new campaigns where they've inadvertently broad-matched themselves into competition with your ads. This can drive up your per-click cost on some terms where you may have little to no competition on Overture. Not much can be done about this, but it's something worth noting.
6. Landing Page Choices. Overture's system forces you to create a specific ad for each search phrase you place in their system. By default, this often leads to higher ad quality because advertisers are more likely to write unique ads for each search term. It also
increases the odds of advertisers to send visitors to the most appropriate landing page on their site for specific keywords. There are two ways to address this in AdWords. Create additional Ad Groups with a tighter grouping of search phrases, or assign unique URLs at the search-phrase level. A combination of both strategies will provide the highest performance along with the most detailed tracking data for stats analysis.
posted by Jen @ 10:07 AM
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