Adsense Adwords - Top Keywords

Why You Should Use Google Adsense Values As Opposed to Overture's Values

The information that Overture provides on its keyword data is much more explicit than Adsense. They provide several tools in order to do keyword research. In addition, there is an excellent tool called Word Tracker which will help you get further information on Overture and how to use their database. All signs therefore point to the fact, that you should use Overture in order to do your research about the cost of keywords and how they will apply to earning money on Google Adsense.

However, things are not so simple at all. If you do take this approach, then it can end up costing you a lot of money in lost Adsense revenue. The fact is, that the prices for different keyword phrases on Overture and Adsense can be very different. Amongst other reasons, this may be because the two Pay-Per-Click providers are aiming towards a different audience.

We will look at an example to contrast and compare the two search engines:

Keyword Phrase        Overture Top Bid    Google Average Top Bid
--------------        ----------------    ----------------------
settlement funding         $100.00            $22.96
business dsl                   $9.00              $6.37
home equity line          $7.84              $20.37

Using the table above, we have to decide on a strategy in order to maximize our revenue.

Going by Overture's bids, 'settlement funding' would be the clear winner. But once you ran AdSense ads for this phrase, your results would be quite disappointing. After all, the top paying advertiser is spending no more than $22.96 in Google's system - the one that powers AdSense!

To make matters worse, if you saw these words in a large list of top paying keywords that went strictly by Overture's bids, you would end up 'leaving money on the table', since you would miss out on targeting high paying term like 'home equity line'.

With Google Adsense, some of the keywords are much more profitable than Overture seems to show you. However if you go with Overture results and use them on Google, then you will be sorely disappointed.

So, you should go by Google's results, not Overture's, if you want to have a more accurate picture for your top bid estimates. So, if you are familiar with how to get bid estimates from Google's traffic estimator, then be sure to also check the bid prices for exact matches (e.g., [home equity line]),since exact matches tend to be higher in price than the other match types, and they are often used in AdSense.