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Writing Ads on Yahoo Panama is Very Different

Over the past 6 months I’ve often wondered why the ads I use on a consistent basis in Google Adwords do not convert on Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama). After all, these ads are tried, tested, and true. They convert well for the most part, and yield a relatively high return on ad spend. So what makes YSM so different? Here is a list of observations I’ve made over the course of a few months.

Search Audience

Yahoo tends to attract a very loyal following of users from a wide range of demographics. For instance, whereas Google users are predominantly 18-35 and the vast volume of commerce traffic occurs during business hours, the same cannot be said for Yahoo. Sure, you get the same daily search patterns for traffic fluctuations, but you can’t say Yahoo users are in any one age demographic. That means your display ad will have to appeal to a much broader audience, getting the attention of young and old, business and recreational users alike.

Geographic Imbalance

Although Yahoo has made significant inroads in Canada through partnerships with Rogers Communications and other ISPs, the search volume is far from balanced with that of the United States. Geo-targeting your campaigns within Canada can have very disappointing results. Rather than advertising provincial or municipal locality, targeting “Canadiana” as a whole is often more successful.

Search Volume

Yahoo pushes a fair amount of traffic across certain search types, and several advertisers are able to take advantage of significant impressions and clicks, however those of us outside this sweet spot don’t see much traffic at all. In a recent post, I compared search volume numbers netted using Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Yahoo just does not stack up.

Price Sensitivity

For all our e-commerce advertisers out there that want to consider Yahoo Search Marketing as a traffic generator, take notice. Your first option should surely be Google Adwords, unless of course you are targeting very competitive keywords and operating on a meager budget. Yahoo can be very profitable under the right conditions. Running an ad that appeals to price sensitive users is hit or miss. Running two identical ads in several campaigns, one appealing to price sensitive users and one not, resulted in identical click through rate (CTR). When both ads were tested alone for two weeks at a time sequentially, they both resulted in the same CTR. Your mileage may vary, but price point advertising does not seem to work as well as in Google.

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