Posted on Thursday 10th of January 2008 at 05:41 in Make Money Online

PPC Showdown Episode 2 - Adcenter vs Adwords day 1 results

I recently asked the question whether Microsoft Adcenter is better than Google Adwords. To try and answer this question I set up identical PPC campaigns on both, here are my day 1 results. Note: I am using a tiny budget for this experiment, but hopefully results should correlate to larger CPC's.

Remember that we're not looking at conversions, simply how the different networks perform.

The setup
Both Adcenter and Adwords have the same set of keywords, the same max CPC and the same advert to display. This will remove variables like copywriting from the equation because both are using the same. Both had a low CPC set at £0.05 because value for money is what this test is about.

Day 1 results (and a bit)
The campaigns ran for the entirety of January 9th (on GMT) and some of today (January 10th). Here is how the two networks measure up so far:

Microsoft Adcenter: Day 1 results
Spend £0.36, Impressions. 130, CTR 5.38%, Avg. CPC £0.05, Clicks: 7, Avg position: 4.45.

So an okay start for Adcenter albeit for very low impressions. 7 clicks is unlikely to deliver a return unless you're quite lucky so at this current level of traffic this campaign would not be able to deliver meaningful income. The CPC has remained at maximum, the CTR has been excellent and the average position is very high (compared to my normal experiences with Adwords).

Google Adwords: Day 1 results
Spend £0.79, Impr. 2,369, CTR 0.75%, Avg. CPC £0.04, Clicks: 18, Avg position: 13.

Google has had a very different start to Adcenter, delivering a LOT more impressions (18 times the amount infact) but having a much lower CTR. The spend is higher because clicks are more than double while the average CPC is actually down. The CPC is 20% lower on Adwords than on Adcenter - which is good.

Day 1 conclusions
Google is the winner so far, spending more of my money but giving me a bit more value for money. The average position on Google shows how competitive it is (13 vs Adcenter's 4.45) but it appears that the sheer volume of searches done on Google do counterbalance the competitiveness.

So is it better to do your PPC on Adwords? At this time it seems so because while the CTR is lower the impressions and number of clicks are much higher - especially given the short timeframe and tiny budget. I'll post another update in a couple of days to see how things are shaping up.

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