Yahoo’s search ad division — Yahoo Search Marketing — has done the unforgivable. They have taken it upon themselves to change their advertisers’ accounts without asking first, and done themselves an enormous amount of damage.
Yahoo has never generated as much advertising revenue per ad as Google. The Panama upgrade two years ago didn’t fix it. Neither did the failed before it happened partnership with Google last year. Yahoo’s broad matching system just doesn‘t cut it.
Instead of dealing with those problems and generating more revenue by providing a service the advertisers actually want, Yahoo chose to indulge in manual tweaks to advertiser accounts to (so they claim)generate more money for all concerned. This action without explicit permission aggravated quite a few advertisers, but Yahoo idiotically insists that the advertisers have no clue about what they really need, and shouldn’t be concerned about something they can’t understand, but should trust Yahoo implicitly.
This plan has been around for a while. Last June, Yahoo discreetly changed its terms and conditions to effectively allow the company to whatever it wants to advertiser accounts. This pretty much went unnoticed until a further terms update came out earlier this month. Bloggers immediately cried foul, and Yahoo headed down the road of righteous indignation at being called to account.
No need to worry, Only a tiny number of accounts were “optimized” by their staff, wrote Yahoo – a ‘tiny number meaning about 2% of them. Since 80% of those changes were accepted by advertisers after the fact, Yahoo claims the changes “have been helpful.” Yahoo also stated that only the small-and-midsize advertisers were impacted, and that could only have been positive as those were receiving quality “service” that only a large advertiser would normally get. They claimed that they informed all affected advertisers usually within 8 hours, and offered the option at that time to get the changes removed (although apparently no refund of monies spent without advertiser authorization would be forthcoming).
Perhaps some advertisers were willing to be dictated to, but many were incensed. Melissa Mackey from the blog ‘Beyond The Paid’ stated:
I manage hundreds of thousands in advertiser spend and have been doing SEM since 2002 (before Yahoo even HAD a PPC program – it was still Overture then). I do actively manage all of my clients accounts. Yet Yahoo felt the need to add a new campaign with ad copy that could have been written by one of my 11-year old twins (wait, I take it back- it wasn’t even that good). And they were bidding on keywords that aren’t even relevant to my client’s offering. It was as far from optimization as it could be.
Yahoo goes on to say that “Advertisers are notified of any changes within 24 hours (usually, fewer than eight hours).” Double b******p. I never received any notification that this had been done – I found it by accident when I logged in to “actively manage” my client’s account.
She went on to say she was terminating her accounts with Yahoo. Meanwhile, Discovery at the Search Engine Watch Forums weighed in in a similar vein:
They created ads that suggested we provided certain services which we do not. This is illegal for us to advertise. If a State’s Attorney General saw some of these ads we would be in some serious trouble right now; with only Yahoo to blame.
How in the world could Yahoo justify such a move? I would love to have heard what was said in the meeting where this program was decided on!
Google handled this same issue the proper way. Advertisers can click on “optimization this campaign”, a bunch of suggestions appear for your account, you review and approve as you see fit.
Yahoo’s blog announcement was subject to comments like the following from “Jeff”:
I’ve pulled approx $600k in planned spend and closed my Yahoo search account. The new terms are totally one sided and unacceptable. I was told by the director of US sales I was not large enough to justify negotiation of terms. Fine. Google gets my budget. This is just another illustration of why Yahoo keeps failing.
Yahoo needs to realize that telling advertisers they are too stupid to decide how to manage their ad spend is not endearing. It’s stupid.