Should I decrease my Adword budget?

[kneoteric]

I heard from one of my webmaster friend that it is more profitable to run Ads on Overture than Adword if I am into selling some knd of products and not information...

He also told me that Google is rather an information protal, while Yahoo! is more business oriented. Commercial visitors know this, and therefore, I should decrease my Adword budget and proportionately increase budget on Overture.

I am in a fix... An advice will be great.

[Mel66]

Why not test it and see for yourself? I'm not sure you can make a blanket statement like that, even within the same industry. The only way to know for sure is to test both programs.

If Adwords is working, I see no reason to decrease your budget.

Melissa

[wasatch27]

I've gotta agree with Mel on this topic... test them out and see which program works better for you. You may find that both work well, and you can increase your sales and budget as a result. Your webmaster friend makes some very broad generalizations, and without testing them, they are just a guess.

[David Wallace]

Like the others said, test, test, test. With decent web analytics and setting up tracking for each PPC campaign, you should be able to tell which is bringing about the best ROI.

[lizcamps]

I have to agree with the respondents above :: testing is crucial. You can't predict with certainty whether G or Y will serve you better, no matter what industry you're in, and I've been surprised in the past but it's great that you can make adjustments very quickly based on the facts.

That said, allow me to fork out some of my own biased opinions.

- Google's audiences tend to be more computer-literate, cosmopolitan, and have higher income and education - whereas Yahoo users are more rural, "flyover state" and less technical (according to a study that I don't have my hands on at the moment)

- Google's audiences may be more skeptical of ads... on the other hand those who do click Google ads are being very deliberate about doing so (in other words they *perhaps* might be more qualified... or they could be competitors :P... probably more the former than the latter)

- Google is just 10X easier for me to use and the pages load so much faster than Yahoo's bloated tables. I realize that is a personal bias.

- I don't know which network is more susceptible to click fraud - anybody here care to comment on this? I think it makes a difference since 5-15% of clicks are considered fraudulent depending whom you ask

Just my two cents,
Liz Camps

[kneoteric]

5-15% of clicks are considered fraudulent

When I tried a test campaign on one of my client's SEM website, I faced a fraudulent clicks of around 50%, perhaps from his competitors. I had a tough time.

[egain]

My own personal experiences have been up and down depending on the market. However the following trends were noticable on many of our clients

- Google significantly higher CPC
- Yahoo generally higher CTR but also higher Cost per conversion
- MSN seemed to convert better than both (% wise), but traffic was significantly less - may just have been market.

Like I said, this varies considerably from client to client, market to market. Test Learn Refine - best words I ever got taught