Yahoo! Marketing Solutions doesn't get it
May 06, 2009 17:49
As I do my pay-per-click analysis and search engine optimization efforts I keep on banging my head against the wall when dealing with Yahoo! Search Marketing or whatever it's called.
In the old days I used to love Overture. In fact, even though I recognized that Google Adwords had more features, I preferred it over Adwords. After Yahoo acquired Overture and the great "redesign" a couple of years ago, everything changed. For the worse.
Yahoo! made it practically impossible to advertise on Yahoo! and essentially lost the pay-per-click advertising battle with Google. Here are my main gripes agains Yahoo!:
- You cannot advertise a keyword exactly the way your customers search it. So most of my customers search for "safes" and most of my clicks are wasted on the keyword "safe". Thanks: the most productive keyword just become the biggest waste of time.
- You cannot advertise just on Yahoo! (and MSN or the other real search engines that are SUPPOSED to serve Yahoo! ads). So when you look at your logs you see that all those 1-page-view visits from the wildest domains you are left to wonder: "and why am I paying for this again?". Yahoo! will tell you that you can exclude domains but the number of excluded domains is capped at 500 and causes me to have to spend time to add them every day.
The bottom line is: when looking at the quality of my pay-per-click traffic there is a huge difference in the quality of PPC traffic from Google and that of PPC traffic from Yahoo. I have already stopped using Yahoo! for one of my businesses and I think that I will eventually follow suit with the rest of them.
Permalink:
Yahoo! Search Marketing is destroying its business
Facebook page updates are in need of updates
May 02, 2009 02:00
I created a page on Facebook for my company,
direct safes. Two relatives and I became fans of the page and I could not wait to send a test special offer to direct safes' limited fan base. I came up with a ridiculously good offer for those loyal followers and sent the update. First thing I noticed is that the message did not make it to my Inbox. Instead, I got a link to a new update.
The next day my salesperson questions me about the discounted offer. I freaked out and sure enough the update was there for anyone, including non fans, to see. There went my plan to encourage people to become fans. What makes matters worse is that I now can neither edit, nor delete the update. So my test is going to sit there for everyone to see. Now, THAT is great!
Permalink:
Facebook page updates need an update or two
