This is a great article that outlines the difference between Yahoo & Google ad words campaign settings.  It touches on the “match types” you can select when setting up a Pay Per Click campaign.  These settings can greatly affect your campaign results and ROI.

       Yahoo has been a frustrating place to buy keywords. But amid massive turmoil at the company, a major change to SEM went largely unnoticed. Find out what it was and how it affects you.
Late last month, Yahoo began phasing out Match Driver, a program that has frustrated search marketers for years.
Match Driver is Yahoo’s method of mapping advertiser keywords to a user’s search. For example, if a user searched for the term “cell phones” in Yahoo, an ad would be triggered if the advertiser bid on the word “cell phone,” matching the advertiser’s phrase with the user’s query despite the plural/singular mismatch.
The original intent was to create a system where advertisers did not need to guess every permutation of a search their prospective customers would type in. Yahoo would do most of the heavy lifting and “map” the permutations to the largest keywords available. This system works in contrast to Google’s system of matching keywords based on the exact keyword that the advertiser chooses to bid on. In the Google system, “cell phone” and “cell phones” would be different triggers for advertising.
Was it broken?
So, why is Yahoo abandoning its old system? For starters an advertiser could look at “cell phone” and “cell phones” and determine the ROI for each (which can be very different). Ad copy could be customized for “cell phones” focusing on comparing different models of cell phones. A user looking to compare products might use the plural instead of the more general singular. However, the most compelling reason why Yahoo likely did this was to respond to advertiser complaints. Match Driver takes the power out of advertisers’ hands and forces their ads to appear for many matches they may not have intended or wanted.
In addition, Match Driver created problems for many advertisers using their Google campaigns as a basis for their Yahoo account. Google allows advertisers to have endless variations of the same word in multiple contexts. Therefore, an advertiser could have “cell phone — exact match — New York — morning” and “cell phone — broad match — Texas — evening.” Both have an opportunity to trigger an ad under the proper circumstances. With Yahoo’s system, if the same keyword was listed twice in the system, it caused problems. For instance, if an advertiser tried using “cell phone” and “cell phones” in the same account, the Yahoo system would sometimes serve an ad, and sometimes not. This was a huge problem for many advertisers and it goes to the core of why so many were underwhelmed by the Yahoo Panama System, the technology behind Match Driver.
So why phase Match Driver out now? What could Yahoo be thinking? The media has spent a tremendous amount of time focusing on Yahoo’s proposed partnership with Google. Yahoo is suggesting that Google serve ads on its pages and the two will split revenues. Many have commented that the partnership will give Google disproportionate power over the search marketplace. They may be right.
Where are we now?
As a result of Yahoo’s decision to slowly kill Match Driver, Google is now in the position of judge, jury and executioner if it finds that an advertiser violates its policies. Why would Yahoo play into Google’s growing power? The only reasonable answer is that Yahoo needs time to go back to the drawing board. Yahoo will hopefully use this time to reinvest in its search product and build something that is a true innovation. However, the first thing the company needs to do is realize that Google has set the industry standard. Yahoo needed to remove Match Driver to get “up to code” so they could build from a common starting point.
Match driver is slowly fading away, but what does this mean for marketers using the search engine in the meantime? The best thing they can do is increase the complexity of the keywords in their Yahoo accounts and observe ROI differences between similar words. As Yahoo and Google continue to compete and enhance their search advertising offerings over time, marketers will need to continue to reevaluate which provider is going to offer them the best results.

Inside the keyword change you likely missed - iMediaConnection.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 7:49 am and is filed under Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.