Advertizing online is trendng up. But you must be very careful because your money could burn out very fast before getting any returns. I like to share with you my experience with three biggest online search engine ads systems: Google Adsense, Yahoo Search Marketing and Miscrosoft adCenter.

We have been working with Google for years. Its system is well designed and easy to use, regardless you are a new or experience user. It provides many options to ensure you are setting the ads to target the right people in the right area at the right time and with the right price. However, it is harder and harder to get clicks with your old budget and the price is going up quickly. I see the return of investment is going down.

We are new of using the Microsoft adCenter. The system is designed good enough to get started. All necessary features are there to ensure you are doing the right thing. We do not have enough time to feel the quality of its clicks yet.

Yahoo Search Marketing system is the worst among the three. It is hard to use, especially to set a right bidding price for your keywords, because Yahoo's system automatically set it to the highest. In my last experience, I set the price to a reasonable number that I can accept for the category of keywords before Yahoo's editorial approval, but this did not do any good. I believe that Yahoo designed the system to take advantage of their customers and when loaded some keyword recently, the sytem charged us a very high price. I then contact Yahoo about it. The following is their answer (by Carol Rockman of Yahoo):

"We are in no way trying to take advantage of you. When adding listings to an account, the bid prices will default to the highest possible bid to place the ad in the number one position unless you change this in Step 3 while adding listings. The bids will not automatically default to what the bid is set for at the Category level within the account.

When updating bids via the Manage Categories page, the bids will only change for the keywords that are currently online in the category. When adding listings, please make sure that you change the bid amounts so that they do not default to the highest bid.

We apologize, but we are not able to refund for these clicks. We are only able to give you the goodwill credit of $25.00."

I am sharing with you what I told Yahoo in my email: "your practices are purposely force or trick customers, un-willingly pay something they are NOT willing to do. None of your competitors is doing that in the industry. So it is NOT a technical problem and I believe Yahoo did this purposely to get paid more unfairly."

It is tricky when advertizing online. You need to watch your pocket very carefully, my friend.