Some Marketers Still Irked By Yahoo’s New Ad System
Some small business owners who buy online advertising through Yahoo are irked by an upgrade to the internet giant’s ad system that is ostensibly designed to make it more stable and sophisticated, the WSJ reports. One company, Imagers, a family-owned Atlanta digital-printing business that spent about $10,000 a month on search-related advertising through Yahoo, said after its account was converted to the new system, Yahoo declined to let the company continue running some ads linked to specific keywords.
The system, known as Panama, allows search advertisers to bid to have their ads displayed when a user types in certain terms. In Imagers’ case, Yahoo wouldn’t let it to link ads to some of the keywords – such as “color printing” and “digital printing”—that were most often typed in by users and still linked to ads by Imagers’ rivals. Imagers says Yahoo wasn’t able to rectify the problem immediately, so it slashed spending on Yahoo to about a $700 monthly rate and increased its budget for ads on rival Google.
Still, as the article notes, other advertisers weren’t particularly happy with Yahoo’s previous system: Pest-control company Orkin said Yahoo shut off Orkin’s search advertising for 36 hours starting on Jan. 8 seemingly without reason. Yahoo said the problem with the old system has since been fixed.
We’re likely to get an update on Panama when Yahoo releases earnings later today.
Related:
—Yahoo Roundup: Opens “Panama” To New Users; Yahoo Answers White Label; ABCNews-Yahoo
—Earnings: YHOO: Semel Promises; Panama Launches; Social Media Delivers
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Comments (3)
Jan 24, 2007 4:20 PM
Our experience has been similar. We had planned a major expansion of our Yahoo advertising, but its been so frustrating dealing with the Yahoo editors that we’ve cut our Yahoo spending to a minimum.
Jan 27, 2007 1:38 PM
Yep. We’re not in a good place with Panama, either. Some of our favorite tools in Search Optimizer did not make the transition. The same with some of the old Sponsored Search tools.
I’m sure Yahoo won’t be happy to know that we are using Google Adwords tools in their place.
Feb 20, 2007 7:52 PM
I manage 6 accounts, all spending about $1000 each month. Although I do like the premise nehind the upgrade, I am extremely frustrated with the implementation. It now takes 3-4 steps to do what I used to do on one page. What used to take me minutes a day to manage, now takes me over an hour. One of the reports I normally run did not make the transition. Yahoo took it upon themselves to place my keywords into “ad groups” without any input on my part. For one of my accounts, with 168 keywords, they placed each keyword into its own group! On my other accounts, the ad groups they chose were not what I would have done, given the option. They are trying to straighten it out for me but, even with them doing the work, it has still uselessly eaten a lot of my time. I used to recommend Yahoo (Overture) over google, for the ease of use, but will no longer do so. Furthermore, I am talking with my clients about dropping budgets, possibly even pulling out of Yahoo entirely, at least until they gte this thing fixed.