Best & Worst Features of the PPC Engines

Posted: March 31, 2007

Someone from one of the major search engines recently asked me what my favorite and least favorite aspects of the various PPC engines were. At first, I thought this would be difficult to list.

Then, I decided I wasn’t comparing them (it’s difficult to compare incremental bidding at adCenter to Google’s incremental bidding in Ad Scheduling as adCenter allows for bid changes beyond just time of day).

So, here’s the quick and dirty list of my favorite and least favorite features of each of the major PPC platforms.

AdWords:

Top features
- Easy interface + AdWords editor
- Google Analytics + PPC consolidated data
- MCC (the absolute best multi-account organization around)
Worst features
- Difficult to ‘update landing page quality score‘
- Visibility into the content network
- API support

Microsoft adCenter

Top features
- Demographic targeting / Incremental bidding
- Parameter system
- Research tools (especially adlabs)
Worst features
- Lack of inventory
- Have to set all commands at the order level (a cascading effect would be nice at the campaign level)
- Interface can be confusing

YSM Panama

Top features
- Account level budget
- Permissions by login
- Ability to only show ads on certain continents (regardless of query)
Worst features
- Inability to see/block content & search sites
- Interface confusing
- Creating ads (especially w/ dynamic insertion) + ad review often makes it difficult to get ads live

Related Information:

« Google as a Branding Platform

Some good links to see inside beta AdWords programs »

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog

Comments

One Response to “Best & Worst Features of the PPC Engines”

PPC Hero » Blog Archive » PPC Weekly Roundup - 4/6/2007 on April 9th, 2007 12:54 pm

[...] is a really good overview of the pros and cons of the â€˜big threeâ€™ PPC search engines. Advertisers who are new to PPC would benefit from this [...]