No Doubt Yahoo Search Marketing Support is Better than Adwords but as I have been using testing with the Yahoo Search Marketing I would like to share my experiences and also the performance of Yahoo Search Marketing. This is my personal test done with the real money for almost 20 days to come to some conclusion. The test I did was on my MBA Forum and the test started on 20th September 2009.
Negative outcome of my test
- YSM interface is not as easy and user friendly as Adwords. Same is the case with reports.
- As I prefer using Google Analytics I could not see reporting based on Yahoo Organics and Yahoo / CPC like I can see for Adwords which is not expected in Google Analytics for obvious reasons and so Yahoo needs some Analytics Program as well.
- Yahoo need to add functionality where we can set traffic sources like traffic only from yahoo searches or from Yahoo Ad Network or both.
- You do not have the option to select the user device from where you can get traffic from. This was a concern for me because my MBA Forum is not very well taken on cell phone and so I should not be advertising there which I could not control
- I needed a different account for targeting different areas of the world so I did not wanted to get more campaigns into Yahoo because I would need someone just to manage my so many accounts.
- The traffic from Yahoo varies a lot. I had no changes in the campaign from the day 1 I setup and suddenly on days it just becomes half.
- The Cost per Click in YSM is not what I could control and I was asked to setup a minimum pre-determined value where as in Google Adwords we can have it 0.01 USD. Lower bid in Adwords means less impressions and so I think Yahoo should adapt to this.
- Yahoo Publisher is not open to worldwide but only to US publisher still very high percentage of invalid click rate. Above 5% and that’s just too high. They need to start banning sooner than later.
Positive outcome of my test
- I tested on a website where my main revenue source is Google Adsense and as per Google Analytics my Adsense eCPM for Yahoo traffic ( Not able to separate Yahoo organic and Yahoo CPC ) was up by 34.41% of my site Average.
- The campaign in Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords was same when it comes to Ads and keyword but my ad got better Average position in Yahoo than in Google for obvious reasons that Yahoo has fewer advertisers which resulted in increased in CTR in Yahoo.
- No need of separate campaign for Bing, Yahoo Search Marketing also brings in traffic from Bing.
Final Thoughts
Though having good support, Yahoo Search Marketing have too many negatives than positive as of now and unless you have a good exposure on handling CPC advertising and is ready to loose I would not advise you to give YSM a try. I would be stopping the test as soon as my money evaporates and I hope they do not keep on charging me. If they do would have few more negatives to add. 
This is based on my personal experience. If you have more to share do leave them in comments and I will try including them to the list.
But if you are not planning to subscribe through Email. Try subscribing to RSS.
I do lot of experimentation on new ways to internet marketing strategies for my web properties and like to share my experiences on ways to make money online @ IMTips.co. Read more about me 