Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum, and I gotta say I'm glad to have found it. The helpfulness of its members toward each other is wonderful to see. But, about this subject...
I've been using Yahoo! SM since it was goto.com. Its been one of the major PPC'ers I've used for (guess about 10 yrs now -- yikes!) Yahoo's new system, IMO, is the best and easiest of 'em all to use at this point. But... I had a situation with Yahoo about 2 months ago, which I thought I'd share with you, and hopefully save someone else from making the same mistake I did.
I set up a new ad group and keywords. Checked it out, everything was fine. Just before activating the new ad group, I mass-set the max spend to 25 cents per click, each keyword. My plan, at 25 cents/click, was to just let the ad group bottom-feed. Within 20 minutes my office started getting massive calls from people who found, and clicked, noe of the new adgroup listings. Hmm, obviously not bottom-feeding! I logged back on and mass-set the adgroup to 10 cents. Just after "updating" it a Yahoo message alert popped up informing me my account had just ran out of funds.
I called and a Yahoo customer support person did his best to try to figure out how I could have gotten so many clicks on the new adgroup within such a short period of time. He promised to get back to me with an answer. He never did.
The problem was caused by me. I left out the "." in front of the 25 cent bids rate...so, my max bid was really $25/click. Even at +1 cent above 2nd highest bidder, and about 100 new keywords, the Yahoo cash register started humming. I was out several humdred dollars.
I started calling Yahoo SM; each time I'd get someone else who had to go though the cursory research, just to say he/she would have to look into it deeped and get back to me. That never happened.
I resorted to sending emails. Emails went back and forth for 2 weeks. The bottom line was, because I was the one who typo'ed $25 bids instead of .25, too bad. My arguement was Yahho spent a million dollars to develope a state-of-the-art "fail safe" system, and they just happened to forget to put a warning out to the user, something like "Are you sure you want to change your bid(s) from .25 to $25 per click?" I don't think so. I believe Yahoo intentionally left that hole in their system simply to snag suckers.
It is clear to me that even tough it's a PPC service, Yahoo is in the gaming business. And their management practices are patterned after a Pit-Boss's job description, which is, "Take the suckers money while he still has some in his pocket."
Perhaps needless to say, I hold Yahoo! SM in very low regard professionally, and my level of trust is equivalently low.
As a result I have reduced my average spend on Yahoo from $1K/day to $51.42/day average. I am not going to be happy until I get it to zero.
I now hope for more PPC competitators out there...and lots of them.
Sorry this post is so long. I'm really not venting -- though it may look like it. But I thought the story worthy of tell.
