Yahoo PPC Recent Performance, Your Opinions

Conversions with Yahoo on a steady decline

[rknoerk]

I've been a customer with Yahoo Search Marketing since 2004 and have been running PPC ads with a good success rate. Over the years, my campaigns generated between 5-10 conversions each month at relatively low cost. Each month I keep tweaking the bids, revise keywords, update the ad copy, etc.

Since December 2009 however, I see no conversion at all. First I thought it's the code but no problems there. At the same time, Google Adwords is better than ever.

Speaking with other marketers I hear how unhappy they have been with Yahoo performance. Before I pull the plug, I do want to give them a last chance.

Anyone here in this forum having experiences to share?

[Dougy]

Yeah, i have called them to find out why conversions have been declining since last year. Their response was more of a 'shoulder shrug'. Things seemed to improve last month a little but over the past few weeks i am spending a lot, getting plenty of clicks on good quality keywords we also use in adwords and see a very poor conversion rate.
They must be trying new search partners which are proving to be poor. I like yourself have been using them since 2003/2004 and had good success with them for a while but now after trying everything i can will have to call it a day with yahoo

[ppc_newbie]

I have seen some weird problems with quality score that might be having some effects that could be messing things up.

Sometimes ads were not showing all the time for some phases, but showing for variations
eg.
KW phase = "round red widgets" with advanced match
search for "round red widgets" was not showing
search for "red round widgets" was showing

No indications/notifications/flags or anything. So now I have to spend time checking each KW and variation to make sure they are showing.

ps. partly my problem because I wasted the time setting up separate campaigns for YSM & "Partners". Only to find out that you can't use different bids for partners because the minimums are still the same, and they have not revamped their historicals to take into account the CTRs for the different platforms thus messing up quality scores.