I just launched two new paid search campaigns and decided to test a tool I’d recently learned about.  It’s a bid and ad copy comparison tool available on the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) site.

If you’re running paid search campaigns and haven’t used this tool, it’s incredibly useful.  It helps you

• Easily pull up other ads so you can write one that stands out
• Find keywords that are more affordable
• Know who you’re competing with for those terms
• Know what you’ll need to spend to rank near the top of the results

Just type in your most important keywords and you’ll see all of the Yahoo advertisers, their ad copy and the max price that they’re bidding for each keyword.

I grabbed a few screen shots for your reference.  The first shot is a search on the term “CRM.”  The top few advertisers are bidding about $7.00-$8.00 per click for this term.

Now here are the results for the term “small business CRM solution.”  Much more affordable – only $0.71 to $0.93.

If you’re a Google Adwords advertiser, you’ll probably know that Google doesn’t make this information available.  And while prices vary between Yahoo and Google, you can still get a good sense of what you’d need to spend to rank highly.  And if a keyword is way out of your budget, you can look for words that are more targeted — less traffic, but potentially BETTER traffic and more affordable too.  (Here’s Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool as well.)

If you’re thinking about paid search and gulping in panic at these prices, here are some other posts that can help:

• How to calculate your maximum bid price
• How to add negative keywords to your PPC campaigns

You may also notice that these ads are much longer than Google allows, but at least you can see the advertisers’ offers and get a sense for copy that works.

What other tools have you used to hone your paid search campaigns?  Post a comment below!