SEM Punch

Yahoo bugs deactivate advertiser accounts - Google laughs

Posted February 6, 2007

Just as I thought my Yahoo experience couldn’t get worse, an even more ridiculous thing happened to me yesterday - my entire Yahoo account was put offline and traffic stopped. I simply got the follwoing message in my account:

The account sempunch.com [my account number] is not displaying ads as of 2/5/07 2:04 PM. This may be because the account has reached its daily spending limit, its balance has been depleted, or your company’s account administrator has set the account status to off.

I checked my account balance, but had sufficient funds to last me for a while. I also didn’t have any budget caps. So I call up Yahoo customer support to ask what the hell is going on.

It turns out a system glitch due to a bulk submission I’ve made turned off the account, but now comes the best…Customer support cannot turn the account back on. Supposedly it is a known bug on the new Panama platform and a ticket had to be submitted to the tech group, who I was told would “get to this matter as soon as they can.” Great - here I am loosing out on a couple of thousand visitors per day and someone over at Yahoo needs to manually flip a switch to get my account back online. That person is probably swamped with emails just to flip switches.

How many people has this happened to on Google’s platform? How many on MSN’s? What about dinky-dog-search.com? No wonder Google dominates this market - their #1 competitor in the space is utterly incompetent.

I just hope Yahoo has enough hamsters spinning the wheels to keep the servers going.

UPDATE: I was just told that my account cannot be brought back online and is lost - so be careful about using the bulk upload tool!

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Tags: Yahoo Panama, yahoo bulk import

Yahoo refuses to take advertiser money

Posted December 10, 2006

I have been following the most recent “rumors” of change at Yahoo with some skepticism. After Brad Garlinghouse’s internal memo, Yahoo announced a radical reorganization, which is supposed to turn the sinking ship around. It is rumored that up to 20% of its workforrce might be layed off - this means roughly 2,000 people lose their job.

For long I have been a big fan of Yahoo search, but not because of the old Overture platform. I hardly had to deal with the account interface, but managed campaigns through the old DTC-XML API. The reason I liked Yahoo was that the account team went above and beyond to help grow the campaigns. They were willing to work on things I hadn’t even asked them for (and didn’t want them to work on, actually) - they were willing to rewrite all creatives for the account, as an example. Well, this was when spend was north of $1 million per month.

I quickly had to learn that Yahoo can be a little tricky to deal with if you spend a few dollars less. Since I left Nextag & Adteractive and began my own search campaigns, I found myself all the sudden starting out from scratch in terms of managed spend. I had a new Yahoo account and no account rep.

Yahoo’s Panama platform painfull to deal with

The biggest challenge I faced was how to get my keywords into the advertiser account. On the old platform keywords & destination URLs had to be entered manually one-by-one. What a pain! I didn’t deal with Yahoo at all and instead decided that I wanted to wait until the Panama release came out - the thought that it could not have a bulk upload function didn’t even occur to me.

Well, Panama came around, I was one of the early accounts to be upgraded and found that I still had the same problem as before. There is no bulk upload function by default! I can paste 50 keywords at once into an adgroup, but then have to specify destination URLs by clicking into each keyword individually - this will keep you busy for quite a while when you want to submit thousands of keywords.

I wrote customer support and asked for the bulk upload link to be enabled. The response I received was that I had to spend at least $6000/year for it to be enabled. So while I was able to up my spend on Google from zero to thousands of dollars a month virtually instantly, Yahoo needed a little more attention until I was “granted permission” to increase my spend through keyword submissions. I submitted my broadest keywords, to increase my spend to about $300/day, waited a few days and called customer support to ask again for the bulk upload function. Now I was told I had to maintain my spend for 2-3 months before I was “granted” the bulk upload function. Reason: “Everybody could tell us that they maintain their spend level, but we require proof.”

Yahoo - this ship’s going down

From my experience as a new advertiser, it became clear that Yahoo fails to understand where the search marketing space is heading. As advertisers become more savvy & experienced in search marketing, the customer demands on features will be centered mostly around volume management - how to add/delete as many keywords as possible & manage performance effectively via bidding. With Panama, Yahoo is going down the “It must have Ajax & look cool” path. Never mind that it costs you possibly billions in forgone advertising money because campaign management is too cumbersome and marketers’ resources are allocated to the engine that provides volume, quality traffic & provides the necessary tools to manage the 10,000 keyword baby diaper campaign. That engine, by the way, would be Google.

MSN allows to upload 10,000 keywords at once, Google releases a desktop application that allows you to upload/manage 100,000+ keywords - Yahoo allows you to submit 50 keywords at a time, without destination URLs. What an accomplishment! Worth waiting for. True, the new bidding platform will allow Yahoo to extract more revenue from advertisers by switching from a second price auction to a Vickrey auction model. However, having simply more participants in the keyword actions in the first place seems a sensible way to increase revenue.

I doubt that the 50 keyword upload function will get new advertisers excited and will bestow Yahoo with an untapped customer base. Quite frankly, the new Panama lacks too many features. In addition, it appears that Yahoo’s challenges for growth are almost archaic policies that were put in place to allocate resources to the largest of its advertisers. As search goes mainstream and competition heats up, wouldn’t it be time to revisit some of these policies?

Yahoo better gets its act together in the next release of Panama. For the time being, since my dollars aren’t good enough for Yahoo, I better get back to a new submission for Google & MSN. They don’t seem to mind taking my keywords or my money.

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Tags: PPC, Yahoo, Yahoo Panama

The Google Sneeze

Posted November 28, 2006

Just read DavidZHawk’s post on what he calls the Google Sneeze. It’s about time that someone calls out the big search marketing blogs on their poor quality of poosts. Often these blogs just repeat news that is already publicly known or simply unimportant; quality posts grow thin on some of those blogs mentioned in David’s post. Personally, I wouldn’t have provided them with the backlinks or I would have used a noffolow link tag.

In any case, I don’t feel very compelled to simply repeat all the industry news, although it might happen here and there as I get carried away. I try to stick to analysis & commentary that is insightful and hopefully helpful to readers.

I haven’t been a very active blogger recently, although I still plan on getting back into it. It’s tough with a full-time job plus running search campaigns on the side.

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Tags: Other

Yahoo’s Panama finally live!

Posted October 18, 2006

This is good news - last night I received an email from Yahoo with a big headline “The New Sponsored Search Is Now Live!” Finally. After Yahoo hasn’t really talked about Panama in their earnings call, they still seem set to roll it out in Q4 of 2006.

It appears that transfers of current accounts to the new platform are made gradual, with assistance of Yahoo. This is likely to take a couple of months; my guess is that larger advertisers get their account(s) migrated very early on. An upgrade center is publicly available, although it only offers some information without any way to actually upgrade. Advertisers will need a new account login for the new platform, which they can either wait for or request. I am not going to ramble on about the procedure of upgrading - check out the upgrade center or this upgrade brochure (PDF).

What’s new in Panama? Not much, to be honest. But here some quick facts:

Accounts exist of campaigns, which may contain up to 1,000 Ad groups; ad groups can contain up to 1,000 keywords.
Ad groups can contain up to 20 creatives.
There will be a bulk upload mechanism available for small advertisers as well. Currently bulk uploading is available to advertisers that spend more that $6,000 per year.
I heard rumors that there will be a Google import tool, which allows advertisers to import Google keywords & account structure into Yahoo.
Bids will be hidden in the marketplace.

This is not a comprehensive list of new features, of course, but you get the idea - Yahoo copies Google’s platform. I think that is okay, as long as they make sure their performance improves. The current (old) search platform often breaks down for advertisers with a large keyword portfolio.

This is also probably a good point to note that Yahoo is releasing an API to go along with the new platform. I’ve read the documentation and in terms of functionality it looks very similar to Google’s. I am not sure what the pricing or availability for the new API will be. But currently access to the old DTC-XML API and the new API is locked - advertisers that want to develop against either one will only get access to the new platform, once it is fully deployed.

P.S.: I appologize for the lack of posts during the last month…due to lots of work I had little time to post, but will try to be better about it.

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Tags: Yahoo, API

SEM Punch

Yahoo bugs deactivate advertiser accounts - Google laughs

Yahoo refuses to take advertiser money

Yahoo’s Panama platform painfull to deal with

Yahoo - this ship’s going down

The Google Sneeze

Yahoo’s Panama finally live!

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