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A Few Items You May Have Missed – That Will Surely Affect Your PPC AccountPosted by Amber on August 28, 2008 in Advanced PPC Strategies |
A lot of changes have been made within Google and Yahoo in the past few months. Chances are you read about them but haven’t kept them top of mind. In this post I’ll go over a few of the larger changes made in Google and Yahoo that will surely effect your PPC account.
Yahoo Minimum Bids: Earlier this year, shortly after Google implemented their quality score and minimum bid changes, Yahoo! followed suit. When speaking to my Yahoo rep about it he mentioned we would be getting emails letting us know if our minimum bids were increasing. At that point we would be given a grace period of 5 days to make adjustments before our keywords would become inactive. Of course, I asked him if our minimum bids would ever decrease and he said yes. If our bids were to decrease we would get an email stating so. However, I never received any emails stating my keyword minimum bids were decreasing, go figure.
Just yesterday I received two messages in the dashboard of my Yahoo account; one said that I needed to review my keyword bids due to increase in minimum bids. However the other messages said that some of my minimum keyword bids had decreased and are now active. Both of these messages came at the same time today. To say the least, I was surprised to see my Yahoo minimum bids actually decrease and some of my keywords became active again! Be sure to check your account dashboard to see if any of your old keywords have been re-activated.
Yahoo’s Ad Profiling: Back in July Joe (another PPC Hero blogger) posted on the Yahoo! ad profiling where Yahoo will upload changes to your yahoo PPC account without your consent. Unfortunately what we have found within the ad profiling is a large drop in performance of our Yahoo PPC accounts.
Yahoo will go into your account to pause poorly-performing keywords (keywords with a low click-through rate) and insert new ad texts.
When we spoke to our Yahoo rep about this he said you can’t opt out of it, and Yahoo doesn’t notify you of when they’re going to make these changes. We even asked our rep to please give us a heads up if possible on the clients this is going to effect, and that didn’t’ help either. We thought that perhaps this tactic of Yahoo’s was over when just a week ago we saw it happen in yet another account. To check if this has happened to one of your accounts, simply go to the import feature in Yahoo, and look towards the bottom where it says upload history. For more information about this you can read Joe’s post on Yahoo’s ad profiling.
Google Pay-Per-Action is Dead: Google announced in June that they were doing away with their pay-per-action beta test at the end of August. Well folks, it’s the end of August and if you are still running pay-per-action campaigns and generating leads from it, you won’t be here soon. Read the full post on Google’s pay-per-action being disabled.
In closing, these are just a few of things that made news months ago, but are now taking effect. Be sure to check your accounts so they don’t negatively effect you!
- Ask PPC Hero! How Does a Weak Campaign Affect the Rest of Your AdWords Account?
- 2 Ways Account History Can Affect Your Quality Score
- Our Greatest Hits for November!
- What You Need to Know About Google Automatic Matching
- Just In Case You Missed It…
August 29th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Yahoo is run by a bunch of morons. Not only do they rebuff Microsoft’s efforts to form a strong #2 in search to take on Google, but they are sabotaging their own search efforts. It almost makes me wonder if someone over there is getting a bribe from Google.
I had a large number of keywords not meet minimum bid requirements. Some of them I could have easily increased, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead, I just deleted all those keywords (and Yahoo goes “woohoo, we just saved $0.0001 in server costs!”).
Yahoo’s ad profiling is utterly ridiculous. Why would I move more budget over to Yahoo (which I was planning on before all the stupid changes) when Yahoo basically tells me they will flush my money down the toilet when they feel like it?
Idiots.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Hi Amber.
Regarding “Google Pay-Per-Action is Dead:” - we have seen Google offer a new beta version to one of our clients -” ‘pay-per-conversion preferred’ option in Conversion Optimizer 2.0 (BETA)”
Have you seen this yet?
Here is what Google says:
“The Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords feature that enables you to use CPA (cost-per-acquisition) bids for your ads. Version 2.0 (beta) is similar to the original Conversion Optimizer, with one key change: when we have enough conversion information for your campaign, you can pay per conversion instead of per click. Learn more about selecting a pricing option for your Conversion Optimizer 2.0 campaign.
To begin using the Conversion Optimizer, you must have conversion tracking enabled, and your campaign must have received at least 100 conversions in the last 30 days.”
We have not implemented this yet though…
August 29th, 2008 at 11:43 am
@ JB
I completely understand your frustrations, I have the same thoughts too!
@ Andy
I have heard of the pay per conversion preferred option in conversion optimizer, but I think 100 conversions in the past 30 days is a bit much for everyone to use.