Yahoo CTR

I have several campaigns running in adwords that I am happy with and I recently decided to give them a run on Yahoo to see if I could get some new traffic.

The first mistake I made was to use advanced match so I got thousands of impressions with almost no clicks. Having turned that off the problem has lessened but not gone away. The campains are averaging a CTR of between 3 - 15% in adwords. The same keyword set is achieving 0.1 - 1% in Yahoo.

When I looked up Yahoo's definition of standard match it reads pretty similarly to Google's broad match. Couple that with the fact that keywords I switch off are still generating impressions and clicks the next day, I am struggling to get anything worthwhile out of it all.

What do you guys consider a reasonable CTR in Yahoo and am I missing something or is it impossible to get exact matches? Are there any information resources dealing with how to set up campaigns in Yahoo that are worth recommending?

Many thanks for any tips that you may have.

 

Well it depends on the industry that you are working in. Some have a high CTR some have low. For me I have for the same keywords a CTR of 0.3 for adwords and 0.9 at yahoo, different ads.

You must understand that the users from yahoo are different from the visitors that you are getting from google.

Yahoo users are more in a shopping mode, and you must have call to action highly targeted ads, just check what the others are doing in order to get an idea. See how the top 10 ads look like in google and see the top 10 from yahoo. And try to figure out what is the difference in your industry. Do it for the top 3 keywords that you are using.

Good Luck!

 

You should also take into consideration that CTR is heavily waited in Google, which means, if your ads are getting clicked on a lot, then Google will slowly push your ads to the top. Whereas yahoos system is focussed primarily on your bid amount, so it’s rather unrealistic to assume you should get the same sort of results on both search engines as both algorithms are dissimilar.

 

Thanks for that, do I need to bother at all about CTR or should I forget about it and just concentrate on getting clicks on quality ads regardless?

 

In Google, getting a higher CTR can actually lower your costs overall since they push your ads up higher so that you're higher up than someone who's paying more than you.

In Yahoo, however, you are only going to pay more money for a higher CTR, there's no secondary benefit I can see to a higher CTR, so you might as well try to prune your traffic a little more than you would with Google, trying harder to qualify clickers and avoid non-converting clicks, e.g., by putting the price of the product in the ad or being more specific about what you are offering.

Basically, in Yahoo you have to be slightly more concerned with the conversion rate on high CTR terms.