Yahoo PPC vs Google Adwords PPC.

I have been avoiding learning how yahoo works for some time. Today I decided to really get into it. Our agency has a Yahoo agency rep that helps us out a lot and I just spent a lot of time talking to him on the phone. Come to find out Yahoo is very different. Here are a few items I hope this turns into a big discussion.
1. Quality Score:
Google – Quality score is on an individual keyword and is figured out at time of search. You can have low and high QS keywords in the same ad group. Broad match and phrase match keywords only show the average QS. Only exact match shows a close to real QS and even then it is still an average since QS is based on things that happen at time of search.
Yahoo – Quality score is only shown at the ad group level. This means that everything in the ad group contributes to the QS. A bad QS keyword can drag down the others. They recommend that we organize ad group like in Google but then split up the ad group by traffic. This means that I get 3 times as many ad groups in Yahoo than I do Google.
2. Match Type.
Google Phrase, Broad, Eact, Negative Phrase, Negative Broad, Negative Exact. Broad is a wild card that will find all keywords with any of the keywords in your term plus synonyms, plurals, singulars and anything that could be remotely related. Phrase will take the exact match of what you put in the term and allow any other terms that have that exact phrase plus anything before or after the term. Exact is very exact nothing more nothing less. Negatives work the same way except they don’t do any guessing. If you put in a singular you have to put in the singular as well. If you put in a negative match you can’t have the exact match of the same term. Google considers a plural and singular keyword to be two different words. Negatives can be done at the Campaign and ad group level.
Yahoo – Advanced, Standard, Excluded Words. This has been very confusing to me. It seems that you have broad and really broad. Yahoo does not have an exact match. Advanced is just like Google Broad and standard is just like Google broad used to be. If you put in a negative match keyword it won’t be excluded if you have it as a standard or advanced match. If you put in a singular it will also exclude the plural. Yahoo considers plural and singular keywords to be the same keyword there is no way to separate them. Negatives can be done at the account level and ad group level.
There are many other differences like campaign settings and geo targeting and so on but these are the 2 main things that are not obvious. I’m not saying that all this is true it is just my understanding. I hope we can talk about this and maybe clear up some of this stuff.

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