For the past few years Google Adwords has been the dominate SEM marketing tool in Canada. Yahoo had a ridiculus process to advertise to Canada through its American site, and different process for Quebec. MSN had no really clue what they were doing and it was difficult as a small business to engage them. All of that has changed in the last few months.

Yahoo launched their Panama platform into Canada a few months ago. I haven’t really had a reason to try another SEM until recently so I tried to setup Yahoo’s new platform. I seemed to encounter the same problem with my account, after sending few emails to the Yahoo CSR team and waiting. Yahoo still insists I need a US account to market to Canada and the Yahoo US process has a problem with my Canadian credit cards. Yahoo’s plan is that I would use the US account to “GeoTarget” Canadian regions. Yahoo always seems so close, yet so far, I gave up on Yahoo at this point…

Microsoft launched their new Adcenter for Live.com a few weeks ago. In contrast to Yahoo, Microsoft really got it right. Gone are the MS Passport requirements and IE dominated interface. The new site a great feel, worked great with Firefox and I had the campaigns I wanted setup with a few minutes.

I’m now running campaigns on both Live and Google ( Sorry Yahoo, maybe next release), the results still heavily favour Google because of the number of impressions achieved. One benefits that Microsoft Live has is that I can down bid with along more control than Google Adwords. This lets me get more leverage traffic from a relatively small budget. I’ve never been a huge Microsoft fan but its great to see them creating some competition for Google