Yahoo Search Marketing Upgrade a Mess
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing
I am in the middle of the second week of trying to sort out the mess created by Yahoo Search Marketing’s upgrade to their new system. While I think the new system has many advantages which include a hybrid bidding model, 2 levels of organization (campaigns and adgroups), and the ability to move adgroups easily, so far the upgrade has been nothing but headaches for us.
We are paying our database developer to create new imports for the new YSM reporting system, because Yahoo completely changed the report formats that are available. I have talked to other affiliate marketers who are facing the same headache, but having a much harder time than I am. I suppose I was a little more prepared, because I saw this coming. I knew the upgrade would be a huge headache and I got my developers on it as soon as I got a preview of the new accounts.
One of the major benefits that I was looking forward to was a streamlined editorial review, where new keywords and ads would go online right away. That was completely misleading. All new ads, adgroups and keywords still have to go through the same old slow editorial review by humans. The only difference is they show up in the adgroup right away with the status of “pending”. What the hell is that! That is not a streamlined editorial review.
I have yet to see how the numbers on the new bidding model will work out. Once I sort out the huge mess that all my accounts have become, I will report back on this.
That brings me to my next point. Why has Yahoo taken categories and made them into campaigns? Yahoo has taken all our existing categories and turned them into campaigns, even though the campaign limit per account is 20. To make up for this they lumped the rest of our categories into one huge campaign called “Merged Campaigns”. So in order to create adgroups to fill these campaigns they split up currently existing categories into smaller ones and named them whatever they thought they were about. Isn’t it obvious that the old Yahoo Search Marketing “category” was the equivalent of an “adgroup” and not a “campaign”? So I have to clean up this disorganized mess. It has made it completely impossible to track my ROI, because what was once tracked as one category now has been split into 4. I have been working on this with a team of 3 other assistants for 7 business days now. I should be working on new projects that we have in the works, but I am stuck fixing something that wasn’t broken. That’s “progress” for you; well that’s “progress” at Yahoo Search Marketing.
I think they should give everyone a week’s worth of free clicks just for putting us through all this. We have been loyal customers and spend thousands of dollars every week. But we have no choice really do we? Yahoo is the big #2 and without them we would be missing out on a really big market. I used to like YSM a lot, let’s hope I can sort it out and make the new system work for us. More details on the Yahoo Search Marketing upgrade to come.
