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January 27th, 2009
The Truth about Account OptimizationsThis program helps small advertisers improve performance issues in their accounts When we emailed notification about our updated Terms and Conditions to Sponsored Search advertisers on January 5, it caused some of our blogger friends to notice our account optimization program for the first time. In reality, we rolled out this program back in June, and since that time we’ve seen some pretty impressive results. Specifically:
Unfortunately, we learned that not everyone in the blogosphere understands this new program, which we believe is the result of misinformation more than anything else. Thus, we want to set the record straight, so that advertisers and other interested parties know what this program is—and just as importantly, what it is not. What the account optimization program IS:
What the account optimization program IS NOT:
The account optimization program in action As an example of what we hope the account optimization program can do for advertisers, we spoke with Mark Bayzath of the All Media Design Group, an ad agency based in Westlake, Ohio. Bayzath described how his client’s cost-per-conversion from Yahoo! Search Marketing ads was over $100 last August. After the changes initiated by the optimization were put into place, the client’s cost-per-conversion was reduced by more than 50%. “Yahoo! came in and suggested deleting some poor- performing keywords, freshened up their existing ads, created new ads for existing keywords, and offered other suggestions on ways to increase the quality scores,” Bayzath recalls. “This significantly reduced our cost-per-conversion, and Yahoo! did it while working within our pre-existing bids and budgets. We’re actually spending less money on click charges but getting better results.” These kudos came from one of several thankful emails that we have received. We are very excited to be able to help more Yahoo! advertisers be successful, and look forward to sharing more such stories. —The Team |
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38 Comments Add your own
1. Jonathan Hochman | January 28th, 2009 at 12:02 am
Yea. The Truth® Now I really trust you.
2. Terry Howard | January 28th, 2009 at 5:28 am
The thing is, this is just not the way it happened. You can check with my account rep, he heard an earful plenty about this from me, specifically because you did not notify us. I had to stumble upon the changes on my own weeks after they were done. We ARE a large advertiser who has in house team of dedicated personal to PPC, a fact our rep was well aware of, yet you still made so called “optimizations”. I’m sorry but your “truth” and the reality were just not the same thing. In any case, you fiddling with ads and keywords, actions that can easily run afoul of a company’s branding initiatives and legal guidelines should be an OPT-IN system, period.
Further, your snide attitude towards the “blogosphere” and how they just didn’t “understand” your system is outlandish. These people making the comments were your advertisers and on the whole, they understand the Yahoo Search Marketing system and the “truth” about this optimization scheme apparently much more than you yourself do. You stepped in it big time, you need to admit it and heal the wounds, not rub salt in them.
3. Mel66 | January 28th, 2009 at 6:45 am
I agree with Terry Howard. Yahoo, you have blown this from the beginning and this blog post is just pouring salt in the wounds. To claim that SEM bloggers don’t understand the new program is a slap in the face on top of a very ill-advised practice on the part of Yahoo. I have been using Yahoo since it was Overture way back in 2003, and auto-optimization is one of the worst things you’ve ever done. I am one of the advertisers quoted in the blogosphere and I definitely understand what you are doing – you are adding new campaigns to client accounts without permission or notification. I never received ANY notification that an optimization had been added to my client’s account. Furthermore, you had written terrible ad copy and were bidding on keywords that weren’t even relevant to my client’s offering. It was as far away from “optimization” as it could be. Worse yet it was spending my client’s money without my knowledge. If the client found out we could have lost the account. I manage hundreds of thousands in advertiser spend every month so I hardly consider myself a “small” advertiser, nor one who does “not actively manage” my accounts. This post is an insult to all of us doing professional SEM.
4. Justin Seibert | January 28th, 2009 at 7:22 am
@Team – this was maybe not a bad idea, but the execution was horrible, particularly in making it opt out and not explicitly stating what was going on to folks. There’s a lot of blogging going on about this and in a cursory glance I don’t see any YSM representation in the comments. I hope you’ll take the time to join the conversation on those sites.
5. jbeaul | January 28th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Wow… I’m a Y! fanboy but I can’t really get behind the negative option aspect of this (not requiring an opt in). I’m also at a loss about how this is being justified. The ultimate goal here is conversions yet no mention of same.
Yeah, the blogosphere will always get all self-important and spin-happy but underlying all that is one important point… they were surprised and not in a good way – something to always avoid.
6. Jonathan Hochman | January 28th, 2009 at 9:48 am
How about naming the people at Yahoo who were responsible for this decision. If you are so proud of these changes, why are you hiding behind an avatar, The Team?
7. Ian McAnerin | January 28th, 2009 at 11:49 am
The problem is, what you say you are doing is not what you are actually doing. People don’t like being deceived, regardless of your intent.
1) Opt-Out is the stupidest thing you could have done. It’s bad practice and is one major reason you are catching flak.
2) Exactly how are you identifying the difference between SMB’s and Large companies? I’d guess spend. Wrong. Sometimes a large company will “test the waters” first, because they are smart and follow best practices. Why didn’t you just ask? Interfering with pilot projects is stupid, since they are seeing whether they can trust you or get results, and you are showing you can’t be trusted and are willing to interfere with the results.
3) We were NOT notified regarding any of the changes. This is a blatantly false assertion on your part. Looking around, I see that I’m not the only one who wasn’t notified.
4) We sent a notice for opting out once we realized what was going on in our France campaign. The result was that within a week it was happening in our German campaign instead. Some opt-out!
5) All of our ads are required to go through legal for checks related to branding, trademark and other issues. My contract says that all ads will go through this process. You caused that contract to be violated. My relationship with my client was also violated as a result.
I have just finished sending recommendations for our 2009/2010 campaigns, and one of the main recommendations was, very simply, to not use YSM anymore. It’s simply not a good business decision to work with someone who shows such arrogance and blatant disregard for their customers.
8. Doug Heil | January 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Okay; I don’t do PPC advertising and hire a firm if a client needs/wants it. I’m on the outside of this looking in. With that in mind;
Yahoo; what the heck are you doing? I simply could not be reading this blog post in the right way, could I?
I just read it again. Now; I may not be the brightest light bulb in the industry, but I do know I’m not the dimmest either. This has to be the most arrogant and ridiculous thing to implement that I’ve ever seen coming from a major search engine. Shouldn’t Yahoo be trying to win the hearts of the SEM industry instead of losing many PPC agencies? Gosh; I would think so. This is not just pathetic for one reason, but real pathetic on multiple levels.
If you truly believe this helps “some” of your advertisers, why not make this thing opt-in? Not only is there no opt-out, but you are not giving your advertisers any other option but to stop advertising with you if they don’t like it?
Amazing stuff. I’d also love to see the naming of the people behind this great idea. I don’t even have a college degree, let alone a Masters degree like I’m sure whoever is behind this has. My goodness.
Walks away shaking head in disgust…..
Comes back for more….
And furthermore; I know many of the posters above who are writing their displeasure about this as well. They have been in this industry for almost as long as I have I believe and are very reputable people. I know for a fact their postings are not done in haste as most of them don’t post unless they have something to say that should be of interest to Yahoo and anyone else.
Take heed and read them. Learn from them please.
9. Markovsky | January 28th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Hey Yahoo,
Stop creating initiatives that are in the best interests of Yahoo, that people obviously don’t want (Account Optimizations). Then you wouldn’t have to spend the next few years tirelessly trying to defend it with face-saving PR articles like this one.
We’ve ALREADY told you what we really want, you just have to listen.
***** AN OFFLINE EDITOR! ******
If you provide advertisers with tools to make their own optimizations faster and more efficient, then you don’t need to hire a department of optimization specialists.
Optimize your customer experience, not their accounts. Get us a decent offline editor and watch your revenues grow. Simple.
10. Mel66 | January 28th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Yahoo, the commenters on this post are a Who’s Who of SEM – some of the heaviest hitters in the industry have taken the time to post their thoughts here on your blog, despite the fact that you think we “misunderstood” you. Doug Heil’s points are well taken – please take heed and read what we have taken the time to write.
11. Al Scillitani | January 28th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
The scarest thing to me is the fact Yahoo does not see the problem, otherwise they would not have created this post. Besides the fact that customers are uncomfortable with anyone going into their accounts and doing anything without them knowing, Yahoo writes:
“It is intended to help raise the performance of accounts.”
What is the definition of “performance?”
The only metric for performance Yahoo can use is click thru rates. Higher click thru rates does not mean higher conversions or net revenue for me. Higher net revenue for Yahoo, but not for me.
Yahoo also writes, “It does not change an account’s daily spending limit.” If you add keywords that generate clicks and no sales, YOU are still spending MY money.
Yahoo does not know my business, my products, my goals, nor what is converting and generating NET revenue me.
12. Ron D | January 28th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
This cost us lot of money before we figured out what happened. It sure was optimized, but for yahoo revenue not ours.
13. freelancer | January 28th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
At least it is possible to opt out.
14. Jonathan Hochman | January 28th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Good idea. Opt out of advertising with Yahoo whenever possible.
My assistant is now wasting a couple days of his time opting out all the accounts we manage. It sure would be a lot easier if Yahoo allowed people to Opt In, and they better be prepare to refund the ad dollars that they are wasting on behalf of unsuspecting clients.
15. Sean | January 28th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
If the idea is to help small to medium sized business advertisers, why not police your “search partners”? The amount of click fraud and plain terrible traffic has caused such a decline in ROI with your service that many advertisers are jumping ship. Sure we can sit around and plug in 500 domains to the blocked list, but we shouldn’t need to. Why not offer the ability to block these “search partners” (which are not really search but instead parked domains with cheap foreign feeder traffic running through them)? It’s a feature Google has had for nearly a decade now.
Stop with the silly gimmicks and focus on your traffic quality. You can doll up someone’s account all you want, but if you’re charging them for garbage traffic from garbage partners, they aren’t going to make the money they need to use your services anyway.
16. Richard Ball | January 28th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
FAIL
17. Mel66 | January 29th, 2009 at 6:50 am
@Richard Ball – best comment yet! Sums it up nicely.
18. Richard Ball | January 29th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Thanks, Mel66. It’s a pity, really. Overture was a viable alternative to AdWords before Yahoo bought them.
BTW, I’ve had some interesting discussions with you on the SEW forums in the past about parked domains. Now, I’m mostly on Google’s AdWords Help forums.
19. netmeg | January 29th, 2009 at 10:11 am
I pulled all my clients out of YSM permanently last week. It’s a shame; some of them have been in there since the Overture days. But we cannot agree with the new terms and conditions.
This was just the last straw. I don’t have any reason to believe that any changes had been made to my client accounts yet, but to be brutally honest – we don’t get enough traffic, conversions, or ROI from YSM anymore (as compared to our AdWords or even adCenter accounts) to even justify having to worry about it. Why *should* we have to worry about it?
So – adios. At one point we were spending easily upper five figures monthly across all accounts; now we have shifted that budget to our other marketing efforts.
Like I said, a shame.
20. jeff | January 29th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
I’ve pulled approx $600k in planned spend and closed my yahoo search account. The new terms are totally one sided and unacceptable. I was told by the director of US sales I was not large enough to justify negotiation of terms. Fine. Google gets my budget. This is just another Illustration of why Yahoo keeps failing.
21. Jeremy | January 29th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I have to admit that I was wrong, very wrong. I thought the T&C that allowed YSM to change advertisers accounts was the most ridiculous, arrogant, bone headed move I had seen from a major player in the SEM space.
Then I read this post.
This post is officially the most ridiculous, arrogant, bone headed move I have seen from a major (for now anyway) player in the SEM space.
It’s bad enough that you’re trying to justify the “service” but you take it to a whole new level when you start lying about what the service does and does not do and basically call some of your most sophisticated and knowledgeable advertisers dumb.
Does anyone on the YSM team have more than 5 years of experience in paid search? Surely there must be a voice of reason somewhere in the YSM team?
22. Jules | January 29th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I think it’s interesting that The Team can only offer one solid example of a success story here but “look forward to sharing more such stories.”
And the 80% of accepted changes – probably 95% of them were simply overlooked – not accepted.
23. Chris | January 30th, 2009 at 8:24 am
I like the meeting that arrived at this decision.
“We stink how can we get better”
” No, we dont stink its the advertisers that stink THEY aren’t smart enough to optimize their campaigns”
“Since we are so good at what we do lets optimize the advertisers account for them”
Sound of a high five!
24. Internet Gatekeeper | January 30th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
This program should really be an Opt-In Only option. Many small advertiser are likely unaware that this could happen to them, even if they get the email, which would probably get stuck in the spam filter if they don’t regularly receive emails from Yahoo. What bids do new keywords come it at? If its the default bid, what if that bid is aggressive because its only for very targeted keywords? Then a new “high traffic” keyword gets added by Yahoo and blows up. The fact is, while an advertiser can after-the-fact reverse the changes, they are still liable for the adspend. I highly doubt any Yahoo Optimizer knows more about a businesses target customers and goals than the business does itself. Any Search Engine optimizes from the perspective of traffic, a business is looking for conversions. Those are by no means the same. Yahoo needs to make this an Opt-In only program for companies that are seeking help, not for just anyone. Its a bad idea in the long run.
25. Charles | January 30th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
You can dress it up how you want but these new terms as completely unacceptable. If you truly believed in their value then you’d make this change OPT-IN ONLY.
I manage numerous PPC campaigns across all Yahoo, Google and Microsoft AdCenter and to have the possibility of you guys supposedly optimizing my campaigns is completely ridiculous. Imagine if the outrage if Google had made this change.
It’s been introduced for one simple reason – to prop up your turnover figures.
I’d strongly suggest reversing this decision or making it opt-in only. There must be someone with some sense over in Yahoo’s search marketing division?
26. Doug Heil | January 31st, 2009 at 8:45 am
http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/advertising/masterterms/masterterms-322.html?mkt=us
Hey Yahoo; Are you able to track the actual conversions a site is making when you insert other phrases and ad copy into an account? No?
Oh, so you are simply making changes to an account in the hopes of getting more clicks and impressions then right?
Thought so.
Is this even legal in the USA?
If I submitted a TV commercial to NBC and wanted it shown on all the networks, and NBC people decided they didn’t quite like some of the details of that commercial; are they able to simply change the details of the commercial I already paid for to suit them? Or is something like that legal? Are they able to make any kind of changes they wish without the permission of the advertiser, or is something like that illegal? Does NBC have my interests in mind if they make willy-nilly changes to my commercial not knowing if those changes produced more profits for my business, or is something like that illegal?
…just wondering
27. Doug Heil | January 31st, 2009 at 8:50 am
The key paragraph in that looooong terms of service:
—————-
OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.
————–
Wow. I can’t think of another word to describe it.
28. Jonathan Hochman | February 1st, 2009 at 6:53 am
Try, UNCONSCIONABILITY. If you want two words, try ADHESION CONTRACT. How about three words: CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT.
29. TheMusicTechnology | February 3rd, 2009 at 6:12 am
I am expecting a better execusion on this. It’s not too late to make some improvement based on user feed back for now.
30. John Pollard | February 4th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Yahoo did email a warning that this was looming. I replied to their email just to make 100% sure that this would only be an opt-in thing. I was staggered that my email was what they needed to make sure our account wasn’t hijacked in this way.
Personally I think a class action would be the correct response from advertisers caught out by this (is that enough to get my post pulled?).
31. L2 | February 18th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Im just a feeble, little advertiser on Yahoo but this didn’t really happen, right?
Time to move on down the road….
32. Johnny | February 19th, 2009 at 10:01 am
I’m a domainer not an advertiser. I’m one of the larger ones also.
I supply large amounts of traffic to Yahoo so they can send those surfers to you guys….the advertisers.
Well, my earnings have taken a plunge lately. I guess I just found out the reason why. Yahoo disrespected the client relationship.
I just can’t understand how Yahoo can keep doing so many stupid things.
NOBODY LIKES TO BE TRICKED YAHOO!!!!
.
33. нeзaбyдкa | April 5th, 2009 at 6:48 am
Я, хоть и не постоянный читатель, но всё же выскажу свое мнение. На ваш блог попал случайно. Однако узнал много чего нового и интересного. Так что, как говорится, пиши еще
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37. Marcus | October 21st, 2009 at 4:14 am
Interesting article you got here. I’d like to read something more concerning this topic.
38. tamaras | January 31st, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Basically, you check out the links of your top competitors and then try to build the same links.Knowing who your competitors are and what kind of time and monetary investment they are making into their online marketing.
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