That guy who has pointed out Yahoo!’s woes is bang on the money if today’s experience with Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly Goto) is anything to go by. The pay-per-click advertising service has got its work cut out when it comes to competing against Google, so you’d think they’d be doing everything they can to squeeze every last penny out of their customers. Instead, they shoot themselves in the foot and pointlessly lose revenue due to needless procedural admin cock-ups. Here’s how they did it with us.
We’ve had Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly Goto) pay-per-click campaigns for almost as long as LoveHoney’s been running, which is nigh-on four years. We don’t spend a huge amount on it – maybe £1,000 a month – but the listings bumble along with a decent rate of a return for not a lot of effort.
Recently it occurred to me that, what with Christmas coming and all, that our Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly Goto) could perform better if we gave the campaign a bit of tender loving care – make sure that the 4-year-old URLs were still resolving to actual pages, add some listings for new product categories, that kind of thing.
We ended up with a spreadsheet containing about five hundred new listings and updates to the URLs on a couple of hundred existing listings. Fearing it could get complicated, rather than use the ‘Manage My Account’ system to upload the spreadsheet, I e-mailed it to the editorial team. What could possibly go wrong?
The next day I received an e-mail:
“We would like to inform you that your search listings have been submitted to our editorial team. You will be notified via e-mail once your terms have been reviewed. Please allow 3 to 5 business days for the process to be completed.
Please note that when search listings are submitted by Customer Services you cannot view the status of these pending listings in ‘Manage My Accounts’.”
Excellent, excellent. They’re on the case and we’ll be online in 3 to 5 business days. Nice.
But then, the next day, another e-mail:
“Thank you for submitting your Yahoo! Search Marketing search listing request. We have processed your request and have listed the results below.
For detailed information regarding your submission, please visit the Editorial Status page in Manage Your Accounts (https://secure.overture.com/s/dtc/center/?mkt=uk&lang=en_GB).
If you have Submission IDs with pending listings, you will receive further notification when those listings have been processed.
Account ID:
Account Name:Approved Search Listings: 0
Declined Search Listings: 163
Pending Search Listings: 721″
Hmm. The first e-mail tells me that I “cannot view the status of these pending listings” in Manage Your Accounts, but the second e-mail, which tells me that some listings have been declined, tells me to “please visit the Editorial Status page in Manage Your Accounts” to review the reasons why the listings were declined. Both can’t be right.
So I visit the Editorial Status page in Manage Your Accounts and, sure enough, I can’t see the reasons for why the listings were declined. I can’t even see that the listings were declined at all.
So I wait. And wait some more. 10 days later I get fed up of waiting and exchange several increasingly irritated e-mails with the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly Goto) customer service database drone which tells me:
We would like to inform you that the Removed, Declined and Pending listings can be located when you select the ?Manage Sponsored Search? page in ‘Manage My Accounts’, then ‘Editorial Status’. This provides at-a-glance views on a listing?s status in the editorial process, including those pending, declined and removed.
Except it doesn’t when you’ve e-mailed the spreadsheet to the editorial team directly. Try as I might, I can’t make the drones grasp this nuance and answer my question — how can I tell what they hell is going on? All they send is stock responses from the database. Responses which are all wrong, as it happens.
So I take drastic measures – I phone them up.
Firstly I’m amazed that it’s a freephone 0800 number, and then I’m amazed when it’s answered within a few rings. Props to Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly Goto) on that one.
I explain my problem. I’ve submitted listings. They’re not online. I think they’ve been declined, but I can’t tell. I’ve e-mailed customer support, but they don’t make any sense. I don’t think they’re human.
So how, I ask, if the ‘Manage My Accounts’ system can’t tell me, and the customer service department can’t tell me by e-mail, and the editorial team don’t tell me, how can I tell if my listings have been declined? How can I tell why they’ve been declined? And how can I find out how to fix the problem?
And what does the (admittedly helpful) lady say?
“You have to phone us up.”
Not that they tell you that anywhere.
You just have to guess.
Oh dear.
And it doesn’t explain why the e-mail drones can’t ANSWER THE FRICKIN’ QUESTION.
And what do they do to solve the problem? They e-mail me back my listings spreadsheet with each line showing the reason that the listing has been declined. Which begs two questions:
1 Why couldn’t they upload this list of decline reasons to the Manage Your Account system?
2 Why don’t they automatically e-mail the spreadsheet back to the customer when listings are declined?
Why do I have to phone up and ask for it? How else am I going to find out how to get my listings online? It’s like pulling teeth.
So the upshot of this is that Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly Goto) lost 10 days’ of revenue from us – they could have had 700+ listings running in that time, rather than none. Not a huge amount of moolah in Yahoo!’s grander multi-billion-dollar scheme of things, but it’s money that they’d rather have had than not.
And if it’s happening to us, how many other customers is it happening to?
Oh, and why were the listings declined? Because we don’t have a teeny “All models are over 18″ disclaimer at the foot of our home page. Would’ve taken all of five seconds to fix had they told us. Not that it explains how we were able to have listings running for four years without it…
Hey ho – where did I put my AdWords log-in?
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