Google Adsense or Yahoo! Publisher

[StephenR]

I use Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher across my sites. I was fortunate enough to get accepted into the Yahoo! Publisher service during it's current beta testing phase. I've noticed higher earnings with Yahoo! Publisher with much lower clickthrough rates (CTR) across similar sites. It would appear advertisers may spend a little more money on their campaigns via Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) than with Google Adwords.

Yahoo! Publisher is still in beta format and has some room for improvement. A slight problem I have with Yahoo! Publisher is how it matches it's inventory from Yahoo! Search Marketing with your sites content. I've found Google Adsense ads are much more targeted to the content on your web pages than Yahoo! Publisher.

Yahoo! Publisher does have a one up on Google AdSense though. In the user administration section of Yahoo! Publisher you're given the option to transfer your Yahoo! Publisher earnings directly over to your Yahoo! Search campaigns. That makes advertising campaigns exceptionally more conveniet and efficient to manage. Wake up Google! In Googles defense though they recently made it possible for their publishers to have their payments conveniently deposited directly into their bank accounts.

So what contextual advertising service do you use?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Great comparison and insights Stephen. Thanks for that. I'm sure lots of people are wondering or have considered testing both side by side.

 

[sensei8]

Nice post Stephen, thank you!

I'll study more deeply these 2 programs ( Google Adsense & Yahoo! Publisher ) because they may fit on some of the sites I'm building.

Still, atm I'd have some questions: Do you have affiliate sites where your you mix PPC publishers ( ex. Google Adsense & Yahoo! Publisher ) and PPS ( pay-per-sale ) merchants?

And what's most important, how do these 2 types of programs return income ?

Hope I didn't ask any stupid questions, but I consider the "only stupid questions being those that remain unasked"

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi sensei,

Yes you can use Adsense or YPN on a page with affiliate links. Just need to test and see what works best. With a high paying, high converting affiliate program best to put Adsense below so it they don't click your CPA link you still have a change to get the click revenue. If you put Adsense on top, the links take the surfer off your site. So you may get 10 cents for the click when you could have gotten $100 for the sale. Just really depends on the affiliate payout and conversion rates.

 

[sensei8]

Thank you for these tips too, Linda. I'll remember this thread when I'll load my pages with affiliate links

 

[weblaunch]

Great review! I think it's a good idea to use both. How hard is it to get into the Y! program? Does anyone know?

 

[lexiseek]

Both are good programs.

One thing that you'll want to be sure of is not running both ads (Y and G) on the same page at the same time. This is against both of their TOS, and could get get your account terminated.

Just thought I'd throw in my two cents!

 

[Eminem]

I like Google and never tried out Yahoo!. I think Google is all the way better but it has a nice feature of transfering your money to invest it on Yahoo! search. Google will surely come up with something as it's currently working on Gbuy which might prove to be Paypal's rival. I think it's going to do well and if it supports GBuy (Money Payment) google might get a bunch of new publishers However, Google for me all the way.

 

[iReef]

Not sure how you can say for sure Google is better if you haven't tried YPN.

I run both, mostly on different sites but in one case through thorough testing I found that YPN works better on some pages of a particular site while adsense works better on other pages.

In general, the payout for YPN is better but it's very inconsistent. They're clearly somehow "playing with the numbers" as far as payout. Annoying, but in the end, the one that earns me more money wins.

And it's great to have options... especially when you get stung by "smart pricing." That happens and I head straight over to YPN.

 

[Eminem]

Not sure how you can say for sure Google is better if you haven't tried YPN.

Sources?

 

[iReef]

Sources?

Ah, I see. Sources can be dangerous to your income you know.

 

[StephenR]

I just finished a second run of split testing between Yahoo Publisher and Google Adsense on Top Affiliate after some 6 months from this original thread. Yahoo Publisher still does not target their contextual ads nearly as well as Google but that is primarily because they do not have the inventory Google has at its disposal.

Conversion rates are still relatively the same between the two, however Yahoo Publisher earns me approximately 4X as much as Google Adsense ads per click. This is excellent news so I just finished transitioning over to Publisher across key portions of Top-Affiliate. I'll still leave some pockets of Adsense purely for additional split testing.

At this point I am recommending anyone who has been approved for a Publisher account to seriously consider transitioning over to their platform. Evidently Yahoo advertisers pay much more than Google Adwords advertisers.

I guess you could run Adwords campaigns to bring in traffic to your Publisher pages and turn a nice tidy profit.

 

[kezza]

wel i use click-share.com and i don't use any of these two any more