Q and A: Which is better - AdWords or Overture?
Dear Kalena...
I run a pet grooming business and I've decided to start advertising using pay per click on the search engines. Can you recommend which would be better for my small business - Adwords or Overture?
Shaggy Dog
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Shaggy Dog
It really depends on your market and where you expect they would be searching. As you target the American market, you'll find icrossing's latest study useful: How America Searches. It revealed that 54% of search engine users are using them instead of the phone book, while 51% are shopping.
The full report determined that AOL, Yahoo, Google and AskJeeves users are mainly searching for information related to a hobby, while MSN users are mainly searching for health and medicine information. Traditionally, AOL and MSN search have been associated with home-based searchers or new Internet users, because of the way the AOL and IE browsers automatically choose their parent search sites as a default. But as Google has the majority market share in US-based search, you can't overlook advertising there.
As you probably know, Overture is owned by Yahoo and advertising with them enables your ad to be seen on Yahoo and Yahoo's network of search partners including MSN, AltaVista, CNN and InfoSpace. Advertising on Google AdWords gives you potential ad exposure on AOL, AskJeeves, Lycos, Shopping.com, New York Times and others. Both PPC providers give you the option of having your ad shown to a specific geographical area, which would suit your kind of business.
The good news (or not so good, if you aren't a pay per click advertiser) is that 56% of Internet users surveyed claimed they did not know the difference between paid search results (advertising) and natural results (unsponsored). My advice? Research your keywords carefully and start with a small seed list on each PPC network to see which performs better for you. Write carefully targeted ads for each keyword and create some landing pages that include those keywords in the headline and copy. Track progress for a month and keep tweaking and adding keywords as you go. You may find it pays to use both services or to drop one as it out-performs the other. Let us know how you get on!
I run a pet grooming business and I've decided to start advertising using pay per click on the search engines. Can you recommend which would be better for my small business - Adwords or Overture?
Shaggy Dog
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Shaggy Dog
It really depends on your market and where you expect they would be searching. As you target the American market, you'll find icrossing's latest study useful: How America Searches. It revealed that 54% of search engine users are using them instead of the phone book, while 51% are shopping.
The full report determined that AOL, Yahoo, Google and AskJeeves users are mainly searching for information related to a hobby, while MSN users are mainly searching for health and medicine information. Traditionally, AOL and MSN search have been associated with home-based searchers or new Internet users, because of the way the AOL and IE browsers automatically choose their parent search sites as a default. But as Google has the majority market share in US-based search, you can't overlook advertising there.
As you probably know, Overture is owned by Yahoo and advertising with them enables your ad to be seen on Yahoo and Yahoo's network of search partners including MSN, AltaVista, CNN and InfoSpace. Advertising on Google AdWords gives you potential ad exposure on AOL, AskJeeves, Lycos, Shopping.com, New York Times and others. Both PPC providers give you the option of having your ad shown to a specific geographical area, which would suit your kind of business.
The good news (or not so good, if you aren't a pay per click advertiser) is that 56% of Internet users surveyed claimed they did not know the difference between paid search results (advertising) and natural results (unsponsored). My advice? Research your keywords carefully and start with a small seed list on each PPC network to see which performs better for you. Write carefully targeted ads for each keyword and create some landing pages that include those keywords in the headline and copy. Track progress for a month and keep tweaking and adding keywords as you go. You may find it pays to use both services or to drop one as it out-performs the other. Let us know how you get on!
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