Yahoo / Overture - Negative Keywords - Negative Customer Service.

When they make a mistake you pay.

[Voxman]

I just found out the negative keywords on the Yahoo PPC / Overture system is flawed. We have been getting clicks looking for FREE widgets and people getting upset with us because they said it was false advertising. We didn't know why because no where on our site did it say anything was free. Well now I know why. Even though we have the negative word 'free' associated with all our ad copies apparently if you put the word free anywhere in the copy it 'negates' the term free from working. We had the term Free Shipping in our copy. So when someone searched for free widgets we showed up in the first position. That led to a bleeding of our account for useless clicks, probably for years now.

When I got in touch with them about it, they made it out to be OUR FAULT. Unbelievable. Two hours after I talked on the phone with them, the problem went away as if by 'magic' but not one penny was offered in compensation for something that has been going on for probably years. Right now our accounts dept. and our lawyers are looking at alternative ways of getting compensated.

Now today I found that by searching our company brand name (which we don't bid on) that we come up first there as well. Can you believe that? We are first in the serps results anyway and they just put the PPC above that to take away any natural search results we may get from people searching our name. So I complained again. Let's see how long this takes to get resolved.

Just to let you all know that Yahoo CAN NOT BE TRUSTED and you have to look over areas like this for money leaks.

Our PPC with them was getting out of control anyway with increasing clicks and lower ROI on a steady basis. We have determined that this carries a high degree of fraudulent clicks but everyone here knows about that.

For now we have slashed our advertising budget (with Yahoo / Overture) for the coming year in half (again). We have done this 3 times before so they are really shooting themselves in the foot with their insulting customer service(?) policies. If they looked at the records we have continually gone down every year in how much we spend with them. We just put the money into more Google Adwords or other alternative advertising that is not PPC. and it's been working fine.

For now I enjoy everytime they report that their profits dropped again.... Gee I wonder why.. :o

[beren]

YES! I have had similar experiences with Yahoo Marketing (Overture). Their own people don't understand the advanced match/standard match. A few weeks ago we had one of their people swear to us that one of our listings would not show with a given setup, only to be embarrased when he did a search and it did show.

I have taken to e-mailing them with a preemptive: "please do not send me an insulting e-mail saying I misunderstand match options" whenever I have a complaint. Because time and again their own people don't understand the match options.

And if they don't understand it, it still ends up being your fault, if you ask them.

This is clearly a company that needs to work on customer service.

[bostonseo]

I could go on and on about how Yahoo is wrecking what was
a good company in Overture. All they care about is your $$$.

[Voxman]

I'm not alone obviously! Good suggestions about the advanced search.

I also think they have made some changes to get your ads out there more but for all the wrong reasons... meaning useless money wasting clicks...

Overture we great when they started, now under Yahoo, definitely second rate.

Time for a new Hot Shot search engine...I say.

[OvertureRep]

Voxman-
I'm passing your feedback along to my colleagues so they can look into the issue.

In the meantime, you might want to make sure that your negative keywords are applied to ALL of the listings to which it could potentially match. You may have done this already, but thought I'd make the suggestion, just in case.

YahooSarah (formmerly OvertureRep)

[Voxman]

YahooSarah... I don't know if you had anything to do with it but they offered a credit of one day (after I contacted them again and tried to reason some more). That's not near what I'm sure we lost in clicks however going back a few years. It seems that behind the scenes they can 'pick' your keywords for you like our company name which we are first anyway in the index.

Yahoo is shooting themselves in the foot with that attitude. We have officially moved more over to Google and other non PPC advertising for the 3rd straight time. Like I tried to point out to them, if they checked our account they would see a steady decline of ad$ going there. That should have been a warning to them but I guess not.

What pees me off even more is all these chezzy affiliate sites and spam (sites) that rule the index while Yahoo and Google 'penalize' the sites they think should be paying. It's painfully obvious as ourselves and our competition (who now use PPC) used to rule the index (because we are the 'real' content sites) only to be replaced by cr@p