Yahoo Panama Doesn't Get It
Yahoo still misses on many points
Yahoo Panama (the pay-per-click platform) has recently released some updates to their system. Some of the changes include day time parting, demographic bidding and a "new" and updated content network. If you've been using AdWords then you know these features are not exactly revolutionary.
On the surface this may seem great. Yahoo Panama has been in need of updates, but this update hasn't done much for Yahoo advertisers and the major problems that plague their paid search marketing platform still exist.
Outdated & Useless User Interface Features:
Ever create an ad in Yahoo and asked yourself why they give you the option for a "short description" and "long description"? Have you ever filled the long description out?
Well... the long description actually serves no purpose. It is not used, yet it remains in the interface confusing advertisers. I had a client that used to fill these out. The client didn't realize this and spent hours wasting his time filling out long descriptions that have absolutely zero purpose.
How about the ad naming? What is the purpose of naming all your ads? There is no purpose and after creating 100's of ads you start to mash buttons just so you can get past this useless field.
There is a bunch of other smaller interface quirks that could turn this post into a 5 page essay but if Yahoo could get at least the above right I would be ecstatic.
Bad Billing System:
Yahoo panama is by default set to charge your credit card when your funds get low. The only way to get out of this automated system is by contacting yahoo to switch you over to a prepay.
Why not give the advertiser the choice of prepay billing or postpay billing like Google does? Most advertisers aren't aware of the alternative payment options and no one likes to go through customer service to get this done. Yahoo needs to be transparent and put prepay in the interface.
If you do switch over to prepay then you will quickly find out that you can't just put in $10-$20 minimums like you can in AdWords. Nope—instead yahoo will take a 3 day average of your spend and request you put in a minimum amount to cover the next 3 days. So if you spend $50 a day then the minimum yahoo will request is $150.
This may seem like a no biggie, especially since you're going to spend that money anyway but when you're in the initial stages of testing traffic then your going to have a day where you may spend $100, another when you may spend $200 and another when you spend $300, at the end of it all you may pause half your adgroups and find that your only going to be spending $50 a day—well, the minimum amount you will be requested to put in is $200 and now imagine you have a limited credit limit and can only afford to put in small chunks of cash per day. The billing system is flawed and greedy—let advertisers decide what they want to put in and don't force them to pay for days in advance!
Still No Editor Tool:
Editing large campaigns with hundreds of keywords and adgroups is a nightmare in Yahoo. This is compounded by the (inexcusable) fact that Yahoo still has no editor. Even MSN adcenter has an editor now. It boggles my mind that Yahoo can sit there and release day time parting features with demographic bidding yet not even have a beta editor tool.
An editor would encourage people to build larger campaigns and spend a lot more money. It would also encourage many users who are exclusive to Google to come over to Yahoo. No one likes sitting spending hours editing ads, managing keywords when that time can be spent in a better platform WITH an editor. If you have to choose where your time would be spent best then this one would be a no brainer.
This one is simple Yahoo: Open Adwords Editor, look at it, put a yahoo logo on it and release it!
Content Network:
For the longest time I couldn't even get 1 impression on the content network. When talking to reps they would tell me there are issues and problems with the content network so I ended up giving up on it all together. Recently Yahoo released its "updated" content network so I decided to give it a try. To my surprise I got impressions—a lot. I had about 50 ad groups and all of them had content network enabled. Each was only averaging 1–3 clicks at a fairly low bid which seemed reasonable given the low bid.
Then, out of nowhere, one of my adgroups got over 2000 clicks in a matter of a few hours, at about a 3 cent average per click. I thought I hit a gold mine for cheap traffic. Well, it turns out that all of the traffic that came in bounced. None of the 2000+ visits actually clicked on anything on the page and of course none of these "visitors" converted—this is on a campaign that at its lowest averages about 1% conversion rate.
2000 clicks in a few hours, and all of them bounced. Something smells fishy.
I paused the traffic and contacted support. Yahoo assured me the traffic was legit and relevant, but they refused to tell me where the traffic was coming from, or refund me any money, despite proving my case by showing them the bounce rates. To be honest I could care less about the few bucks I spent testing the content network but the greedy nature of Yahoo has really taken them down a notch.
This is a company that is currently giving away $50 free credits to anyone who signs up and advertises (a sign of desperation) yet they wont refund for mass amounts of obviously low quality (and potentially even fraudulent) traffic—nor even provide assurance that their traffic sources are relevant. One thing is for sure: test your content network traffic before putting meaningful cash into it.
Yahoo has the potential to be a great advertising platform but they continue to shoot themselves in the foot, while the competition continues to improve. If Yahoo takes care of some of the basics they can regain some footing. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use Yahoo, they are still a great source of traffic (minus the content network) and the conversions on Yahoo (again, minus the content network) are usually very good but be prepared to deal with some of the issues I have outlined above.
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As for ad naming, I tend to have a system in place for ad copy testing so I can quickly review the ads from thousands of ad groups where each ad name represents one of my blind tests. For example, one ad could be "BestPractices" and another one be called "ChallengerAd" This lets me determine best performer by metrics without knowing the specific piece of the ad I happened to be testing. I agree that it's silly for requiring it for the ad to run, but I try to make some use out of it to keep things slightly more organized.
Their content network is indeed fishy, but my experience has been that Yahoo is good at refunding a lot of the monthly expenditures from the content network due to low quality. So while your 2,000 clicks cost $60, I bet at the month's end you'd see 30-40 of that come back, lowering your total average CPC to $.01 or so.
As for billing and editor tools, I agree. They suck and need to catch up.
I can see some slight usefulness but the biggest problem is once you have a few hundred ads the whole ad naming seems to make things a little more disorganized - at least in my experience. Perhaps you can expand on exactly how your using the ad naming effectively.
Thanks for posting don!
-AdrianS
As for ad naming, one can include the date in which the ad went live as its name, so you can sort the ads by oldest to newest to see which need to be updated (since Yahoo still doesn't have a change history...another way that they're lacking). Another way is to name your tests. For example, if you're testing the effectiveness of a specific call-to-action like "Call Now!" versus "Call Us Today", then one Ad can be named "CallNow_040109" and the other be named "CallToday_040109". This way you have the test you're running and the date it started all in one easy place. If you're using Excel 2007 you can then delimit the AdName column of the ad performance report by the underscore, and break out the pieces of information into separate sortable columns.
I called Yahoo and they were (initially) really good about saying they would refund the overspend. But then, it happened again. We overspent by about 4,000 or more. The rep at Yahoo said there was a systemic problem with the content network.
I said, fine, fine - just give me my money b/c my daily spend is $50--not $1,400. They agreed to refund our money. Then the credit card bill came in and Accounts Payable was like: Hey! I went back into YSM and paused all adds. I called and emailed the reps at YSM and have been given the rep shuffle ("Oh, Jospeph's the one handling your case and he's at lunch...he'll call you back." No call. Email - same thing.
John, I think your observation about Yahoo's greed is bang on. More--I fully expect to hear some bad news about YSM in 2009/2010 because I think they tried to model their system after Adwords as a license to print money, not as a way of providing a simple, usable and economical advertising tool.
Even when they fix their problem (assuming something is "broken") I don't know if I'll bother with YSM again.
As far as Yahoo's editor they have one in early Beta but they are still testing it. I'm sure the same lack of attention to usability will come standard.
Janice - thats terrible. I wouldn't completely give up on Yahoo just yet, but I would definitely avoid their content network (at least for now). Yahoo sponsored search (in the actual serps) beats Adwords as far as conversion rates go... of course the traffic is much lower. Thanks for posting!
Nitrometric - thats exactly it. They need to do some serious usability testing and be more pro active in creating solutions.
Sometimes I think of the Yahoo Panama department as one programmer/developer/marketer that they put in a basement and every 6 months they go and see where hes at with new features and updates. Hopefully they will one day change that impression.
I even prefer working on Msn Adcenter.
Hey Guys on Yahoo ! Do you see that your competitors (adwords and Adcenter) improve their interface ?