Yahoo! Marketing Solutions doesn't get it
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.