PPC Campaigns: How To Choose Where To Place Your Ads

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

While I’m on the pay-per-click kick, here’s a quick tip to help you determine whether you should use Google, Yahoo, or another source for your PPC campaign.

First, consider your target market. Are you aiming your advertising toward techies? Keep in that Google may have the lion’s share of searches, but they don’t have the lion’s share of searchers. Allow me to spell out the difference.

Google has captured more than 50% of the search market in the U.S. In the UK, 75% of searches are conducted on Google. But keep in mind that those are individual searches.

Yahoo, by contrast, second in number of searches in the U.S., has more than 50% of search traffic. I hope you see the difference.

Yahoo is the most visited website online. More visited than Google. The reason Google gets more searches is two-fold:

Techies and web-savvy users tend to perform more searches throughout the day whereas John Q. Public may only perform one a day or less.
Much of the traffic on Yahoo is for games, e-mail or other services that do not pertain to search. On the other hand, users of Google’s ancillary services are more likely to stick around and use that search engines search features.

These are telling numbers. Not everyone will benefit by using Google for their PPC campaign. You may be better off on Yahoo, or possibly even another PPC search engine. There are two questions you must ask yourself:

Who is your target audience?
What is your PPC budget?

Remember, your audience is a primary concern. And your budget is as well. The same ad running on Google will likely cost you more than it will on Yahoo or another PPC search engine. But that shouldn’t be your primary purpose. If your target audience is more likely to use Google for search then you’d be better off paying the higher click prices.