Yahoo! Search Marketing Has No Business Sense

August 9, 2007 – 7:25 pm

For paid search campaigns (those ads on the top of your search engine results), a company would bid on keywords so that their ad would appear for those search results. Active companies bid on multiple keywords and various concatenations of keywords. Usually their portfolio of keywords they are bidding on are in the tens of thousands.

Keyword portfolios are managed through paid search advertising arms of the various search engines, with the big 3 as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. In order to bid on keywords, one can either manually enter in each word and group them by campaigns or ad groups. If you had a small search campaign with few words, it would be easy to do this online. But, what if you had to create a campaign of 10,000 words? Would this be feasible doing it one by one? Of course not. Google has an easy to use downloaded application where you can cut and paste keywords in bulk. MSN is more personalized where you can email a spreadsheet to your account rep to upload. Yahoo!, on the other hand, has a bulk import feature but it is not active for all customers.

Pause for a second and consider this. Why in the world would Yahoo! disable this functionality for some customers? They have a minimum monthly spend requirement before turning this feature on. This to me makes absolutely no business sense whatsoever. Yahoo! wants its advertisers to bid on as many keywords as possible. The reason? If you click on an ad, then the advertiser must pay Yahoo! for that click. You would assume that Yahoo! would want its customers to be able to bid on as many keywords as possible and have as many ads out there as possible to get clicked on.

However if you are starting a new campaign from stratch, there is no way to meet the minimum monthly spend requirement to enable the bulk import feature. So instead of having the ability to try and spend more on advertising, you are limited from the beginning. I even called customer service to ask about the policy and was told there was nothing they could do about it. I asked if I could pay a fee to have it activated. Again, the answer was no. The customer service rep admitted that she’s heard this time and time again from people calling in on the absurdity of it all.

Yahoo! needs to stand back and examine its business practices. While Yahoo! is a technology and content provider, they need to step into its advertisers shoes and realize who is paying the bills. Google understands this and makes it extremely easy. Any guesses to who has the majority of online ad revenue?