Posted on Tuesday 8th of January 2008 at 16:03 in Make Money Online

PPC Showdown Episode 1 - Is Microsoft Adcenter better than Google Adwords?

Whenever I've taken a look at PPC I've always gone to Google Adwords because they're the obvious choice. They're market leaders and I manage other advertising through them so it only seemed natural; but recently I've taken a few steps into Microsoft Adcenter and pitched these two systems against one another.

Google Adwords seems a good choice considering how strong a combined solution Google can offer. Once you combine Adwords with Google Analytics it's a great solution - but Analytics has it's downsides and that's something I wanted to try and prove by using Microsoft's alternative.

Downsides to Google Adwords
Because it's the market leader it's also highly competitive which means that many other users are bidding for the same keywords as you; this makes speculative PPC quite an expensive business. Sometimes you just want to run a campaign to see how well it converts without dedicating serious amounts of cash towards it - this can be difficult on Adwords due to how overcrowded it can get.

You can also get screwed by your "quality score" - something Google assigns you based on your website/landing pages. I'm a bit fuzzy about it but the basic premise seems to be: bad quality score = higher CPC. I think it's fair to say that the major upside to Google is that because it is the market leader the number of impressions you receive is dependant upon your budget alone.

Microsoft Adcenter helps solve this problem, less popular = lower CPC
The advantage of using MS Adcenter is that it's less popular than Adwords, meaning it's less competitive and therefore the CPC is lower; meaning you can afford more click-throughs which should hopefully translate to higher profits. Unfortunately Live search doesn't have the same volume of traffic as Google - but that's not to say it's quiet at all; I've found you can quite comfortably munch through your PPC budget with over-zelous keyword usage.

The maths I'm looking at
The basic idea is whether I can get a better CPC out of Microsoft's Adcenter compared to Adwords; of course a good CTR is no use without impressions so I'll be measuring that too. Conversions don't matter at this point, purely the performance of the network. So what I'm hoping to see is:

Adcenter: 1000 impressions at £0.05 per click with a CTR of 5%
Adwords: 1000 impressions at £0.07 per click with a CTR of 2%

Therefore Adcenter would be delivering 50 clicks compared to Adwords' 20. Therefore the cost of 100 clicks for Adcenter would be £5.00 compared to Adwords' £7.00. *These are just speculative figures to show what I'm going to be looking for, this doesn't reflect the performance of either network at this point.

Both campaigns are up and running
As of midnight tonight (GMT) both campaigns are running on boht networks, both with identical keywords, identical max CPC's set. It'll be interesting to see how they perform against one another. I'll be posting the results in a couple of days to see how the two different systems compare - I think it could be an interesting experiment.

There's more to it than who offers the lowest CPC, because £0.04 on Adcenter with only 100 impressions wouldn't compare well to £0.05 on Adwords with 3,000 impressions (if both had the same CTR). So when I start seeing results I'll compare them. Watch this space!

 

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