Comparing AdWords and Overture (Yahoo!Search Marketing) Part 1

Published on September 28th, 2006 by Jeremy Chatfield

Yahoo!Search Marketing (previously Overture, previously Goto) is the grandaddy of paid search. Despite “first mover advantage”, it is number 2 and looks headed to be number 3, at least in the US and Europe, to Google AdWords and more recently MSN AdCenter.

It’s still an important source of leads though. Just as you shouldn’t ignore the fraction of your user base that has disabilities, you shouldn’t ignore the fraction that don’t use Google or Google’s services on other sites. So this stream of articles looks at the differences and virtues of each of Y!SM and AdWords.

Keywords are the base of both systems. A keyword is submitted by an advertiser for matching user searches against one of a range of match techniques. Y!SM offers “Standard” and “Advanced” match and a separate “Content Match”. AdWords offers “Exact”, “Phrase” and “Broad” match and an associated “Content Match”.
There is no direct equivalent between the matching systems. This makes comparing performance somewhat difficult. AdWords offers the greatest granularity, so I’ll analyse Y!SM based on AdWords keyword usage.

Y!SM’s “standard” match offers the listing (advert) to exact and phrase matches. The Advanced match is closest to Google’s “Broad” match, but also seems to extend to preferred partners content match. The bidding system prefers “standard” match to “advanced” match – standard items are listed first.

One performance test to compare the matching systems is to collect the searches used (found in the referrer_info field of web server log files and sometimes reported by web analytics packages) and the keyword that was used (by tagging the advert with an identifiable string). This will demonstrate how far the matching systems will go to generate impressions and clicks.

We’ve found that Overture’s Advanced Match (the test was conducted before it became Y!SM) is sufficiently… flexible… to have “hair loss tonic” and “weight loss clinic” searches match a term for a financial services product that didn’t have the word “loss” anywhere in it. This extension of matching was unwelcome and hard to control before the fact. Y!SM does offer an “Excluded Words” mechanism that would allow adding “hair”, “weight”, “loss”, “tonic” and “clinic” to force a failure to match.

Google’s Broad Match will also extend, to the point at which it will offer an advert with someone’s first name (a common name) as the keyword, to a search for “cheap holiday”. This was appropriate for the client, if unexpected. Like Overture, you can only tell after the extended matching has been done, and someone clicks, what the extended match is finding appropriate. We have not found inappropriate extended matches – though we have found negative keywords that we should add, during web server log file analysis.