First thoughts on the YSM Panama update
David Rosam on Mar 01 2007 at 12:59 pm | Filed under: Pay Per Click, Yahoo
As regular readers of this blog may have realised, I’m not a great fan of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). However, on the face of it, they seem to be gradually getting their act together by launching their Panama update.
Luckily, we set up a US YSM account for one of our clients last year, so we have been able to look at what’s happening - you did realise that for every country you want to run YSM ads in, you need to set up a separate account, and run them individually? Because YSM doesn’t cover anything like every major country in the world - whatever happened to that India account I enquired about in September, or thereabouts, last year? - you can’t even make a decent fist of a worldwide campaign.
I’ve tried running a YSM campaign in five countries. It was bloody, involving loads of duplicated effort and mind-numbing inconsistencies in advertisement approval rules between Yahoo! territories. It’s an experience I don’t want to repeat again too soon.
Google Adwords is so much easier and more cost-effective in terms of management time for our clients than YSM. Google lets me target a large list of countries, or a localized campaign right down to a circle around a particular Postcode (even more flexibility in some countries) all from one Campaign definition.
If I seem to be making a general critique of YSM rather than the Panama update, it’s because it seems to be just window-dressing, failing to tackle the real structural problems Yahoo! has with its Pay Per Click offering. Sure, introducing Ad Groups will make day-to-day management easier if you’re running a campaign in the US - we’re still waiting for Panama in the rest of the world.
But it still doesn’t look as if Yahoo! is going to integrate its YSM territories anywhere soon. That would be a real win for advertisers and agencies. And for Yahoo!
OK. Back to Panama. The new screens look better considered than the old horrors. But I also wonder of they’ve made a howling mistake in following the Google Adwords model so slavishly and jettisoning YSM’s real USP, its transparency of bidding. It’s what many professionals like. And it’s no longer there. YSM has come over all mysterious like Adwords when it comes to what we actually pay for a click.
So permit me a not-so-polite yawn and allow me to go back to recommending and using Google Adwords for most client campaigns.
