Yahoo TuneUps - Dont Bother
Yahoo tries hard. So does the cheesy guy at the bar, does not mean either of them ever scores.
We recently ran the Yahoo Tune-Up that was available in one of our accounts. (SERoundtable talks a little about it here.)
This was a totally wasted effort, it was so off base that we just had a good laugh and moved on.
For instance:
It suggested we bid on tons of trademark words that we have submitted and been denied for hundreds of times, despite feeling we have good content about or in quite a few cases actually offer that product.
It assumed some ridiculous CTRs on words, some over 25% many more 10%+
It counted mapped words as separate, when they really are not. Every 2 bit PPC expert knows that keywords in Yahoo get mapped. White Elephant = Elephant White = White Elephants = Elephants White. Yet Yahoo itself was listing things like this on 4 different lines (with the same exact Impressions and Clicks on each line) and then adding them up. I had one mapped word we get like 1000 clicks a month from say it would be 3000+ clicks from and it got counted 8 times. So in effect they were saying we would get 24x the volume from a word we currently already show in 2nd place for…
It was suggesting we raise bids across the board (even on words we are in 1st place now on) I saw almost none that were not at least doubles. More than a few where we are bidding $3+ (for very high positions) and they were suggesting we bid $15 or more!
They actually said that they would magically get us 250% more impressions each month (without adding any words not in the account and all words they suggested are 5th or higher position), that our CTR would go down slightly, and that despite raising the bid on every single keywords that our CPC would go down almost 60% and clicks would go up 250%, thus spending only 1% more per month!!!
This is obviously not ready for primetime and shows just how in touch Yahoo’s engineers, business managers and customer service people fail to even understand their own product.
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on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Rants, Yahoo.
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November 30th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
YaWho? I am not sure what to say, other than I search with google… Yahoo ranks me #1 for “hustle strategy” though where google has me as 2… So I can’t clown them until I rank higher on google, because it makes me look bad… I do need to study SEO more.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
That’s funny - thanks for taking one for the team.
December 1st, 2007 at 3:11 am
..”Yahoo tries hard. So does the cheesy guy at the bar, does not mean either of them ever scores.”
Another classic line!
December 1st, 2007 at 1:05 pm
It looks like that the people who really do ppc, are the ones that know how things work or Yahoo thinks that most of their customers are stupid enough to believe what they preach! LOL