Yahoo Search Marketing Vs. Google Adwords

Well after being slapped silly by Adwords I started to move some campaigns over to Yahoo Search Marketing. Great points for Yahoo is that they answer emails with specific responses to your questions within 24 hours. They also even answer the phone. If you want to advertise outside your continent they need to create sub accounts for you. This they did without a problem. Another point is that now they do not accept free trial offers with a credit card. For example you cannot say free for 7 days then $19.95 per month. I had such a campaign so I changed it to a flat monthly fee and put the price in the ad. This way I weed out some of the freebie seekers. The free trial deal works great but I might get more of a quality customer this way so it is worth a try.

I chose a wide variety of keywords, over 500, that related very well to my site. Note that not all the keywords are actually in my site but anyone interested in those keywords would definitely be interested in my offer. I hope that I am not penalized with a “Yahoo Slap” because not all my keywords are actually in my page. This is a major disadvantage with Adwords. If you have terms that you know relate exactly to your audience but are not in your page Google will slap you. (Actually sometimes I just think they slap you for the fun of it!) A human reviewer of a site could look at the keywords and the topic of the website and see that they really do relate. This is very difficult for bots.

So far Yahoo creams Google for customer service. Let’s see how they do in the long run. I will keep you posted.

Matthew Meyer