Yahoo Search Marketing Continued Problems

Yahoo Search Marketing Problems Continue

The major problems with YSM are their ability to disregard application errors continue and here are some to look for:

We all know that in August of 2005 their whole system failed and advertisers couldn’t login, place their bids or add additional search terms. The question to ask is why? Why would such a failure occur in the first place? The simple answer is their lack of testing systems or application additions before applying them to the system in the first place.

Sometimes advertisers want to make major changes to a business web site and even at time a total re-design. So the proper thing to do is turn your account offline and with YSM this means turning off all categories. The problem that can occur is that when you go back in to turn them back on, the system will inform them and show them at all search terms by each category is up and active. The only ways to correct this is by going back in to your account and turn each category on one by one and wait about 15 minutes between each category. If you’re a retail account and have 10-20 different categories this can be a time consuming process and can take several hours. Would someone consider this as a system error, we would say YES.

Their conversion system in reality has a mind of its own and you can upload their application to your web site and you see that it works sometime and sometimes it won’t. We’ve taken the time to load it in and uninstall and then reload. It won’t complete its task regardless how many times you do this. It would be wiser to take your directional link and additional code of your own to obtain your real conversion rate.

When an advertiser first logins into their account they’ll see current day numbers and I don’t care if you live on the east coast and its 3 pm your time, don’t believe the numbers. Even if you look at prior day numbers, don’t trust what you see. You’ll have to go into YSM Report section to see actual true numbers.

Report Generating System: When you want to run some reports and put in the dates you wish to review, you initially see this:

Your request is currently being processed. To obtain your report, return to this page and enter your request again. If the request has been completed, the report will be displayed at that time.

Come back later and try again, give me a brake. Sometime just as a friendly hint and about 50% the time all you have to do is re-click Generate Report and the report about half the time will appear.

If you’re a B2C advertiser and might not want to use the Content Match, watch out, it also has a mind of its own at times. Of course Yahoo Account Services will tell you that only you can turn it on, not true. Also if you’re a B2C advertiser Content Match isn’t a wise selection, nor is Advance Search. Select your search terms carefully and select Standard Search, then check your backend Statistic System and if you don’t have one, make sure the one you elect to have, has a Search String application that gives you the actual search term the searchers use. This will also help you in future selection of search terms and very cost effective.

We manage about 100+ accounts for clients and monitoring of their marketing dollars is something we do as part of our customer service. We don’t re-sell PPC services as is one of the major rules for either Yahoo SM or Google's Adword Program but we see about 20 proposals per month that state they have agreements. Always ask for references or copy of the understanding between them and the PPC firms like Yahoo or Google.

We think that Yahoo Search Marketing after purchasing Oveture has gotten so big that they’re they’ve given up on real customer service.

Independent Computing Group, L.P.

Office: 513-942-7869

Cell: 513-702-6928

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