I am a new business proprietor who has spent approximately $200 with Google, $120 with Yahoo and $50 with MSN. I am appalled at how bad Google’s Adwords program. Adwords provides inaccurate information encouraging you to bid much higher for keywords than necessary, tends to report clicks that appear to be fraudulent (based on my experience anyway) and provides overzealous censorship of Trademarked words (or even words that aren’t trademarked).

Here are 3 observations based on my experience:

1 – Google will report my ads are not showing because I failed to bid enough rendering the keywords inactive. If I wait 24 hours and check again my keywords are still listed as ‘inactive’ yet my ad will appear at position 4 or 5 out of a dozen ads. This seems to be a scam to extort non-professionals into paying exorbitant rates for clicks unnecessarily.
2 – In the period of 10 minutes my ad was clicked on nearly a dozen times draining my account of nearly $50 in literally seconds. Of course there is no way to find out exactly where these clicks originated from nor force Google to investigate them.
3 – In my ads I list “MS Certified SQL Server admin”. The words “MS”, “SQL, “SQL SERVER” are all censored. No wonder searching for “sql server consultant” results in a bunch of “certified database administrator” ads. You are not allowed to advertise your products unless it is generic enough to blend in with all the other ads.

I moved to Yahoo and the results are fantastic. Yahoo’s statistics are dead on 99% of the time, the interface is beautiful, the click filtering works (along with stats on the number of clicks filtered) and my conversion rate is much higher (near 20%!). I will never use Google again.

MSN’s interface is just terrible but I list some basic ads on their site with low bids just to get some exposure but I don’t maintain it.

Hope this helps someone.