January 6, 2009

This is bad in so many ways... why not just say hey we are taking a few thousand dollars and you can't do anything about it

I recently found out they feel themselves the owners of copyright for anything I post in my 360 blog. Shouldn't a standard EULA stay standard? Or a EULA with special provisions clearly state that upfront? Who reads every single EULA for every bit of installed software or sign up made? Shouldn't this go to court?

Additionally Yahoo has been "improving" its service, so in the effort to becoming a social networking site, I am constantly finding new ways they provide my personal information to third parties. What terms of privacy apply to them? They do say "we collect information in this site," again a nonstandard provision, but they feel themselves entitled to disclose it, give it away, to anyone who wants it?

Yes, this is a beaut! I had this happen to me back in September. Yahoo just went in and "optimized" one of our client accounts, made it active and told us 3 days after the fact. Here is the email:

"
September 18, 2009
As a highly valued Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser, we try to do everything we can to help ensure your success with our product.

As part of that process, we periodically try to review your account to make sure you are getting the most out of your campaigns. During our most recent review, we noticed that some of your ads had significantly lower ad quality scores than your industry peers.

As we all know, the best way to get potential customers to click through to your website is to have good ad copy. Not only do well-written ads receive more clicks, but high quality scores can help to reduce your cost per click and increase your rank in search results.

In order to help improve your campaign, one of our dedicated Content Specialists carefully reviewed your site and created new ads designed to highlight your business' competitive advantages. The new, “optimized” ads utilize features such as keyword insertion with Alt-text improvements, consistent with our best practices. We have not deleted or made any copy modifications to any of your existing ads.

Attached is a spreadsheet itemizing these updates to your account. The updates are in bold.

If you have any questions or concerns in the meantime, please feel free to contact me.

Best Regards Mr. XXXXX "

Questions Concerns?
NO, Never. I am absolutely sure that Yahoo has more insight into the nuances of our vertical than our vets with 10 years of experience. And I was right, this clever genius picked out the highest volume generic KW's and created ads around them regardless if we actually offered those services. Pure Genius. Then my mystery marketer did something amazing; they opened our ads full force on the "content" network which resulted in a landslide of traffic! Man I can't believe we simply were too dumb to know we were missing out on this kind of volume from China. And their PPC guru did another amazing thing, they created ads with dynamic KW insertion and didn't add a thing to the negative KW list. Yes, my friends we fortunate to receive the help of Yahoo's optimization master.

We have now implemented Yahoo's best practices across all our campaigns.

#1 Use all the generic high volume KW's you can.
#2 Get rid of all those pesky negative KW's that kill traffic volume.
#3 Create generic non-descript ads via Dynamic KW insertion.
#4 Turn on content match
#5 Turn on Expanded/Advanced match

Follow these steps and you too can be an optimization specialist.

This is truly amazing, and I'm not sure I've ever seen this precedent set by any other advertising medium. It seems Yahoo is taking responsibility for interpreting the messaging in ads and also authorizing changes in search that impact not only the way people find those ads, but in effect what companies will pay for being found. I can guess at the good intentions behind making ads and search terms more relevant, but is Yahoo the place or the proper authority to do this? Seems among other things like a huge conflict of interest even if Yahoo could prove appropriate product expertise to do so. This alone is enough to discourage me from advertising on Yahoo.

Time to lower the budgets on my Yahoo accounts, or can Yahoo optimize that as well?

This is going to be the death knell for Yahoo!

eZanga.com is a search engine that specializes is pay-per-click advertising and gives full reporting and tracking of your Return on Investment (ROI). They narrow search results based on relevancy and location which can drive more traffic to your business and your website. eZanga offers more security for your investment with Traffic Advisors™, their anti-click fraud technology which is used for all advertising campaigns.

I would love to hear a Yahoo spokesman discuss their decision to do this. I am sure they will say they are doing it to help their customers which would prove to me that they have no idea about real ROI. High CTR and more taffic does not always mean higher revenue (higher costs, but not higher revenue). Without my personal revenue data, inventory levels, conversion data, product margins, latency, etc.. (nevermind bid restrictions or wording that may not be allowed per agreements you have with companies you are working with) how do they know which keywords to add or proper adtext?
My advice to Yahoo... Send out an apology letter, explain the program, and make it opt-in only. There may be individuals that the program may work for, but I do not want Yahoo in my account without my permission.

Wow. I needed to read the T&C more closely. Thanks for the alert.

It is astonishing how Yahoo has bungled PPC. Their system is by far the most user unfriendly. At least Microsoft asked users what they wanted and incrementally delivered. Yahoo does not even have an offline editor! Google as AdWords Editor, Microsoft as AdCenter Desktop. Where is your tool Yahoo? Then we don't have to fumble our way through Panama.

Now they want to implement optimization without approval? That is upsetting to say the least. Every other vendor gives you the chance to edit and approve changes.

Desperate and pathetic. This is a serious blow to their credibility.

It's clear that Yahoo doesn't understand what makes search engine marketing valuable. The reasons for consistent declining state of the company become clearer by the day.

"Hey, valuable customer! We don't care what you need. We only care about what we can get out of you."

It would have show more respect to send emails to select advertisers offering campaign optimization support.

All I can think of is the SNL News segment "Really?!"

I had a client running a reasonably sizable Yahoo Search Marketing program. They were considering dropping it because it consistently underperforms Google.

When I got "the email" (same one Jerry Nordstrom quotes above) from Yahoo -- that did it.

When you're already a distant #2, infuriating your customers isn't a real promising tactic to increase market share.

We have a few pharmaceutical clients that require regulatory and legal approval on all ad copy. Yahoo isn't going to get their approval for ad copy changes, so when they tamper with these accounts, it will create a legal risk for our clients. These new terms and conditions absolve Yahoo of any responsibility, and that's just not acceptable.

Yahoo states this only affects accounts that are pre-pay. Invoiced accounts will not be touched.