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One also needs to know how the advertising agency handles the syndication of your adverts as well.

For example - yahoo/overture is simply who bids the highest gets top spot.

Where as adwords is based on bid, quality score and performance and has dynamic adverts.

From experiance (of observing others) I can see that adwords is probably the best if you know what you're doing [where I work at the moment pays far less for a top spot ad than the second place ad pays for it's position, but when the ad is in position 3 it gets the best CTR]

The market also has an influence - the preference of SE that your target audience use. I don't yet know what type of people use which engine but from figures and stats i've seen over the few years I've been in internet marketing show me that people with widely differing interests and lifestyles use different search engines.

I’ve only used Yahoo and Google myself and I think my findings were pretty standard:

Google:

> far more relevant
> far great click through rate
> better back end

Yahoo:

> far greater revenue per click

So with that said I use a mix of both…. (NOTE: you can't use both on the same PAGE, but you can use both on the same SITE)

When it is crucial that the ads be extremely relevant to the price content on a page I used Google…because that’s the only people click on the ads

When the content does not need to be a “perfect” match to the content on the page...but still somewhat close to the theme of the site and I can get away with it I use Yahoo because I will generate far more $ from each click

…like everything else it just takes some patience and testing. Simply adding some code to your site and expecting it to bring in big bucks may not work all that well. Finding out which PPC program to go with is simply step 1 in the multi step PPC optimization journey anyone displaying ads should head down.