SEM Punch

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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