I’ve been having so many problems with Yahoo! Search Marketing lately, that I thought it’s time to post some of these. YSM is generally a decent program to work with, but they need to start doing some things and stop doing others if they want a product that’s competitive with Google AdWords. Consider this post a plea for Yahoo to continue to improve the organization supporting their search marketing.

Here are the problems I’ve had with Yahoo!:

1. YSM editors will rewrite ads for your account and upload them. They do their own optimization without asking. Supposedly, I should have received a notification that this was happening, but come on? Editing ads without express approval from the owner of the account?

2. A Yahoo! “leak” onto the content network. Last month, paused campaigns started showing ads. A Yahoo! Rep described it as a “leak in their back-end.” The “leak in their back-end” wasted money (they’re doing the right thing and refunding it), causing the account to hit budget limits and shut off early in the day, preventing productive ads from showing. Besides the direct costs of the paused campaigns showing ads, there was the opportunity cost from the good ads not showing.

As far as I’m concerned, YSM owes me big time for setting a reasonable budget to limit the insanity, otherwise they would have had to refund a lot more money than what they’re refunding now. This mistake in their system probably could have cost somewhere in the 10′s of thousands for them just for this account if I wasn’t experienced with using their system.

3. I can’t wait for a YSM desktop editor…with clearly articulated account limits.

Poorly defined limits on bulk uploads and downloads through their console. After making a few changes through the Yahoo! console it sometimes freezes up, not allowing me to download or upload changes because I’ve hit my limit for the day. Without a lot of advanced planning, extended roll outs, or use of an API (which also has limits), Yahoo effectively makes it impossible to edit large accounts. YSM reps say they can’t help with this one.

4. YSM’s minimum bidding system is causing less relevant ads to show for a major keyword for the account.

I manage an account with very similar ads and keywords. Basically, they run the same ads across ad groups except for small changes in titles. One ad group doesn’t have a high enough bid to show ads for a particular keyword, but a bunch of other ad groups will show ads for that very same keyword through advanced match, even though bids are set at 1/2 what the minimum bid is listed to be for this keyword.

Worse yet, these ads are sometimes specialized to a particular state and the keyword is not state-specific. I consider it a flaw in their system that it will show advanced matched ads for a keyword that’s listed as inactive in the ad group that is bidding on it directly.

So there you go. That’s one week of problems with Yahoo!! (two exclamations, one for Yahoo!, one for the end of the sentence).

Yahoo! recently announced that they are going to display Google AdWords ads for some of their queries. If you read a lot about internet marketing, you’ll see that the popular angle towards explaining the extra revenue Yahoo! will generate from such a move is AdWords has greater relevance in ad distribution. I don’t think that’s the primary reason why Yahoo! will make more, and if it was, it’s bad news for Yahoo!. I’d count that as a vote of no confidence for their new Panama system, and that fact could be more damaging to their reputation than an extra $250 million in revenue is worth.

It’s true that Google provides more match types, better negative matching, more location targeting, and apparently less spammy search partners. When I manage ads on AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing for the same company, I typically expect better conversion rates on Google than on Yahoo!. But I also allow for a higher cost per conversion on AdWords. Getting more traffic, more exposure on first page results, itself has value to the companies I manage. These companies are less concerned with YSM. This pushes more budget into Google AdWords, regardless of the cost to generate direct business. The reasons I think why Yahoo! will generate more revenue by using AdWords’ distribution are:

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I’ve been doing a search engine optimization for a few years, and I don’t really think there’s much difference between the major search engines. There might be some little differences, most noticeably:

• MSN still displays very spammy pages every once in a while.
• Google updates some pages faster and makes an effort to find breaking news/content.
• Google gets a lot of pages in its index.

A little less noticeably:

• Google puts huge emphasis on links and link quality.
• It’s possible to get new pages with a lot of new links to the top of MSN fast.
• Yahoo! might put a bit more emphasis on “on-the-page” content than the other engines.

Overall though, I think the major search engines rank really similar pages. And I think that optimization efforts that are good for one engine, generally work for the others.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) no longer has a $0.10 minimum bid according to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Minimum bids for keywords are based on quality and keyword value. Quality means they reward ads that get clicked on more relative to competitors with lower minimum bids. My experience with AdWords has been that this doesn’t matter a lick. Ads that get clicked on a lot are ranked higher and have low minimum bids but it doesn’t matter because you have advertisers lower than you for the keywords you’re bidding on. Then once you lower the bid to the minimum, the minimum starts going up again. This shouldn’t happen because the system is supposed to normalize for position, but from my experience, it does. I’m guessing Yahoo! will be the same.

The important factor is keyword value. AdWords made a lot of “long tail” terms more expensive by setting minimum bids higher – YSM might do the same. It might also affect some high traffic terms; the whole thing is sort of a mystery there. So for example, if I search “irs” on Yahoo!, I see more than 10 advertisers. On Google, I see one. This is probably because of minimum bids.

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The Yahoo! Search Blog announced a new “open approach to search,” that looks somewhat similar to the recommendations I gave Yahoo! for “improving” their company in January – except I called it making search more exclusive. It looks like me and Yahoo! might have different opinions about the meaning of “open.”

The blog doesn’t give too many details, but we’ll see how things roll out. According to Yahoo!:

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners — big or small — an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines.

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The news around town is that Yahoo! is failing. With the growth of Google, the resources the company had once it went public, it’s not totally surprising – that growth had to come from somewhere. But even considering that, Yahoo!’s marketing efforts have been markedly poor from the start. They failed to differentiate themselves from Google, as Google continued to become more and more dominant in the market. Years in the making, and Yahoo! didn’t seem to take on the task of becoming a real competitor to Google. They still aren’t. As an internet marketer, I consider Yahoo! a place to go to advertise once it looks like you’ve maxed out your exposure on Google. They are a source of a little extra traffic that can come at a reasonable cost because they aren’t overrun by spam and because they have a pay per click advertising system that works relatively smoothly. If their market share continues to drop, it won’t be worth it to advertise with them any longer. Yahoo! ought to be concerned about being displaced by MSN or some other search engine as Google’s primary competitor. Read More

Today’s SEO researcher enjoys the choice between numerous keyword generation tools, each of which offers their own relative strengths and weaknesses.

Take, for example, both Yahoo’s Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Keyword Discovery Tool. I use these two interchangeably, often because what I expect to be fairly common search terms bring up no data in one or the other database. I’m hesitant to trust either tool completely, mostly because of some strange inconsistencies as well as the skewed nature of the data. Not to mention the irritating way both are prone to crashing, and require frequently reloading the page. Read More