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Yahoo! Thinks My PPC Accounts Suck
March 9th, 2009 | John | Yahoo! Search Marketing


I got a good chuckle today. In 5 minutes time, I received two emails for two different accounts from Yahoo! Search Marketing this morning. The first one told me that my bids were too low, and the other reported that my ads are too low of quality. Wh-what? Yahoo! must think my PPC accounts suck!

Email 1: Your Bids are Lower on Average than Most of Your Competitors

Email 2: Low Ad Quality may be Causing You to Pay More

I’ll never admit to being perfect, but the two accounts in question are two of my strongest Yahoo! accounts. (Thus my chuckles upon receipt of the messages.) On the surface, these messages seem harmless and perhaps helpful. But again, my paranoid side has flared up a bit and I see Yahoo! trying to fill their coffers. I’ll explain both emails briefly:

On the first email, Yahoo! said, “…we recently noticed that your bids are much lower on average than your competitor’s, which could result in much lower traffic to your site.” Ok, so if I remember right, a big part of the whole PPC game is to actually TRY to get your bids lower than your competitors by improving CTR and leap-frogging their lesser quality ads with the Quality Index (Quality Score‘s little cousin). I’m driving a huge chunk of traffic. So I feel that this message is trying to use the guise of helpfulness to blind me to the fact that Yahoo! simply wants me to increase my bids. Further proof? The first recommendation in the email was to increase bids. The other suggestions are at least a touch helpful – improve ad quality (Duh! That’s how my bids are so low!) and expand keyword selection.

The second email stated, “…we recently noticed that your ad quality is lower on average than that of your competitors.” Now this is a message that I want to read. This is a piece of advice that comes from a level of visibility only Yahoo! has. And honestly, this concerns me. So the suggestions started off strong – create multiple ads and test them, include special offers and prices and strong calls-to-action (OK, I definitely practice what I preach, what else?). Then they started pushing DKI, which I feel is a CTR-bandaid (i.e. money maker). But they ended strong with suggestions on relevancy including geo-targeting and optimization strategy suggestions. I felt that my Quality Index scores were pretty good and that my ads and optimization strategy were pretty good – but in this case I guess I’ve got work to do?

So, weird day for me for Yahoo!. Weird choice of messaging. (OK, so I’m doing my worst Randy Jackson judging on American Idol impression.) One email was good, the other sent me off the deep end. I hate to be a one-trick-pony as I’ve complained about Yahoo! a lot lately, but seriously – what is Yahoo! up to?

Did anybody else get these messages today? If so, let me know!

Related posts:

  1. And Yet Another Wave of Yahoo! ‘Minimum Bid Requirements’ and Keyword Updates
  2. 4 Ways to Enhance Your Performance in Yahoo!’s Panama
  3. Minimum Bid Prices Changing in Yahoo!
  4. If You Don’t Check Your Yahoo! Minimum Bids Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later
  5. Yahoo Is Going to Automatically Optimize Your PPC Account Without You

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Yahoo! Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.searchengineppc.com Lindsey

    I got the one about low ad quality this morning too. It was so out of the blue, and on an account that I know has better ads than their limited competition. Yahoo’s wording, though, did cause me to sit up and take notice, so they have that going for them. But, man, did I not need that as the first thing in my inbox this morning!

  • http://twitter.com/ann_nguyen Ann

    I got a similar email for one of my accounts as well.

    They’re up to the same thing they usually are.. finding little ways to get you to spend more. They just announced lowering the min bids. Meaning, people are willing to pay less than what Yahoo expects us to pay w/ the min bids (for questionable traffic), so they’re giving into those $0.1 bids again. Its the bottom line I tellya!

  • http://www.performicsinternational.com Eloi

    Hehe, that does indeed sound like a money grabbing email :)

    I would take the first email as a “trophy”, meaning that you use to Yahoo system so well that they ‘need’ to get more money out of you :) So I guess…. “congratz!” ;)

    I also agree with your DKI = bandaid statement. With good account structure, you shouldn’t need to use DKI. My two cents.

  • http://www.ppchero.com John

    @ Ann,

    Yeah, the minimum bid adjustment emails and now this – it’s just too much, too fast. Which signals to me that Yahoo! is desperate to increase revenues. Thanks for the comment!

    @ Eloi,

    Nice – I will consider it a trophy for a job well done. Suppose that makes me feel a bit better. I’ve always been of a mind that a well optimized account should negate the need for DKI. But Google, Yahoo! and MSN all push the feature – aiming to the lowest common denominator I guess.

  • http://www.ppchero.com John

    @ Lindsey,

    Managed to completely miss your comment in the WordPress queue… doh!!! Regardless, thanks for commenting! Yeah, seeing a message like that isn’t the best way to start the day, especially when it contradicts the numbers/performance you know to be true.

    I’m still scratching my head a day later on this one…

  • Amy

    I also received the email about raising my bids which left me scratching my head.
    We have opted out of the automatic optimization that yahoo offers so maybe since they cannot go in and raise my bids for me they decided to kindly give me a swift kick in the butt to raise them myself. No thanks, we too have used ad text, landing page optimization..etc..to achieve these low bids. Seems yahoo has stooped to a new level of begging.

  • http://www.scrappybusiness.com Josh

    Yeah, I got both of these as well..

    Oh, and then they decided to completely SHUT OFF my entire account because of what they call “widespread relevancy issues”!

  • http://www.ppchero.com John

    @ Amy,

    I like your thinking – “new level of begging.” That about sums it up. Thanks for commenting!

    @ Josh,

    Holy Crap! They actually shut off an account??? Was the account performing well based on your own goals? If so, what in the heck would cause Yahoo! to turn off an account due to relevancy issues? I’d be on the phone with someone at Y! trying to get an answer on that one. Let me know if there is any more information you can share on this!

  • christine harrison

    I have had several less-than-desirable experiences with my Yahoo account rep.

    My comment is related, but not entirely, to this post. Has anyone noticed crazy exponential increases in impressions for keywords from time to time. I have reported it 3 times in the last few months, and got refunds for two of them. They said they had an internal error with the advanced match feature or suspicious click activity, etc. One of my adgroups had a keyword impression average that went from around 6,000 monthly, to over 50,000 only 3/4 of the way in the next month!!!

    So after talking to them about my last refund being about 1/6 of what I should have received, I got the run-around about advanced match and Yahoo partner sites.

    Bottom-line, check your keyword impressions from week to week or month to month, you may notice it too!

  • http://www.ppchero.com John

    @ Christine,

    There have been a few occasions where impressions have spiked (relatively speaking) for a few clients. However, the impression spikes haven’t affected click or conversion volume. I do monitor the Click Filter under “Traffic Quality Reports” and in the case where I’ve seen a spike in impressions, I haven’t seen a direct correlation to increased invalid click activity.

    That being said, what exactly is Yahoo! refunding to you? Are your impression spikes resulting in click spikes as well?

  • christine harrison

    Yes. The reason I notice it is because the cost per conversion had increased so dramatically for the adgroup. When I check the keywords there is usually one I can attribute it to – where I see the cost per conversion increase from somewhere around $12.00 to $58.00. That is when I check the clicks and impressions.

    There weren’t any seasonal differences (resulting in increased impressions) and the same adgroup/keyword for Adwords wasn’t affected by the spike either time.

    Yahoo told me that its advanced match could have shown the ad to more partner sites in their network for that month/week/day. They said the only way to combat this is to run reports and calculate which sites were generating the most invalid clicks and block them. Of course, this would have to be done on a regular basis with full Yahoo analytics set-up (I am currently trying to implement it through GA though).

  • http://www.performicsinternational.com Eloi

    I have also seen the impressions shoot up randomly on some days… The clicks didn’t get any increase though, meaning our CTR for that day would be very low… comparable to content CTRs.
    Our rep tried to use the ‘some keywords experience spikes if an article talks about…’, argument which we quickly dismissed because AdWords didnt get the spike, and that spike was impression only.
    I think it’s time we got rid of the “!” at the end of Yahoo! and replace it by “?!” ;)

  • http://www.ppchero.com John

    @ Eloi,

    I like it. Start the new Yahoo?! movement. (imagine saying that with the inflection of a question – hilarious in conversation)

    @ Christine,

    If you’re actually getting a spike in clicks leading to that big of a spike in cost-per-conversion – I’d be banging down Yahoo?!’s doors too. Glad you were able to get a refund on those.

    My question to you would be have you found the right GA Filter to attach the full referral info to track Yahoo?!’s search partners in Analytics?

  • christine harrison

    Thank you both so much for your comments. I too agree with the new and unimproved release of Yahoo?!

    Right now I am slowly integrating (to avoid an account wide increase in cost) new destination urls in my Yahoo ads to track the ppc campaign/adgroup/keyword in GA. However, I don’t think this addresses what you are referring to. I checked referring sites in GA (after I talked to the rep) and I did have to visit them to see if they had Yahoo search implemented. My guess is that isn’t the most time effective way to do it :-)

  • http://www.nehmedia.com Jared Huber

    John,
    Maybe something like custom > search and replace >

    Referral
    (.*)
    Campaign Source?

    Try it on a throwaway copy of your profile.

  • http://www.ppchero.com John

    @ Jared,

    I’ll have to give it a shot. I’m not a pro quite yet with creating GA filters – but I’m learning quick. Once I figure it out, I’ll write a post on it (how novel, right?).

    @ Christine,

    Yeah – your first step should be to get your utm_source tagging started to tracking your Yahoo! traffic in GA. An advanced filter will be step 2. Once I get something figured out, I’ll post it to the blog.

    No problem on responding to the comments. That’s what we’re here for!

  • http://www.floridacostalweddings.com April Gicker

    So I saw this and thought I should remark on the beginner nightmare of just starting on the internet to begin with. After I set up my site with the EASY (it is over simple to the point I should have paid a person to do it) site builder I entered the realm of advertising. PPC is the game I entered after reading that my site may take months yes I said months to enter into the search engines. What? Now I have a site that hits pretty good on my search words I am not paying for and high for the ones I am paying close to the minimum for. Great for me, but I am thinking that my site is not as good as it should be because I used their builder so when I move to Google am I going to have to rebuild to get the traffic there and lose Yahoo traffic.
    I didn’t get those letters and probably won’t because I used their stuff. But I think I will have problems down the road because I followed their advice and I feel it is lacking. Love your site, just stumbled upon it, well not really it was number 3.

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