Yahoo! is terrible. Why are they killing my budget?

Going over daily

[Craigv]

Hey folks, I used to be spending a lot more on YSM but have put more towards Adwords lately. I have my budget set to $60 a day on YSM but it is going over that budget almost daily. It went up to $200 the other day.

I have their content match turned off as well.

Any input?

[KathySmith]

I agree you should look into this as something is violated from your original sign up.
To have a really successful business getting involved with the legal side of things is workable. It's very much the context in which the game of business is played. For "legal reasons" it's rare to find an interesting lawyer blog, but to find a General Counsel blogging, well that's some thing very unusual. It's a new blog, but so far it's been worth the read.
<snip>

Hope this helps.
Kathy

[edited by: werty at 7:56 am (utc) on Nov. 2, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed URLs - please see TOS #13 [/edit]

[brizad]

If you look at the "money manager" page in your YSM account you will see this at the bottom:

"*Please note: Your approximate daily budget is a target only. You may see fluctuations in your actual daily click charges due to changes in search volume, but your total monthly click charges should be close to your target monthly budget (target monthly budget is calculated as 30 times your approximate daily budget, for a rolling 30 days). If your total monthly click charges exceed your target monthly budget by more than 15%, you may be entitled to a refund."

[Hiccup]

Not sure if you got an answer yet, but here goes. If you started at $60 per day, that's $1,800 per month. When you raise your budget to $200 per day, yahoo still assumes there is 30 days in the month so now they can ding you for $200 x 30 days = $6,000.

If you raise the budget mid month, you are essentially telling yahoo, ok I know I've spent $60 x 15 days = $900 with you so far, but I want more clicks so now I raise my budget to $200 per day. To yahoo this means, we've got $900 already, there's 15 days left, (but we'll ignore that) and assume he wants to spend the entire new $6,000 this month. So, let's cap it at $6,000 / 15 days remaining = $400 per day!

Bottomline, they show you a daily budget, but are always thinking on a 30 day schedule. That is why they're going over your daily budget.

Does it make sense? No, they're a bit retarded in that they do not explain this anywhere. But I've experienced this myself. So always take into account the full monthly spend you desire and how many days are left in the month whenever you raise your "daily" budget.