There are changes afoot at Yahoo Search Marketing, with a whole new platform, and ranking method based on bid price and CTR (sound familiar?) coming soon.

I’m still waiting for my go-live date for my upgrade to the new platform, though that’s probably more to do with the fact I put very little money their way at the moment due to their crappy outdated system, whereby it takes you an hour to put a simple campaign into their system, a week for them to approve 60%, deny 40% for no good reason, no live stats, massive amounts of click fraud etc etc.

We first opened an account when they were called GoTo, and still refer to them as Overture – and it’s no surprise why – apart from the logo, the interface has hardly changed in the last seven years. But according to the emails Overture Yahoo Search Marketing have been sending me, all that is about to change…

They promise:

• Easier account management (A control panel I can find my way around.. cool)

• Fast ad activation (Ads live within an hour is their aim.. time will tell of course)

• Ad testing (multiple ads, tweaking the best converting, nice one)

• Geo Targeting (excellent, ban those Chinese IP addresses – shame the serious click frauders will mask their location so may still slip through)

• New ad ranking, based on max bid price AND click-through ratio (or “potential” CTR for new ads)

All of which is good news, and it’s nice to see some progression from them at long last. However, I feel this upgrade possibly isn’t going far enough. I mean, isn’t this just matching what Google Adwords have been doing for the last 5 years?

They’ve lost a lot of ground in the PPC market in recent years, and I feel this may be too little, too late.
The biggest problem for me right now with Yahoo is the level of click-fraud. I’ve had to pull complete campaigns and reduce £2.00 bids down to £0.15 on Yahoo to keep campaigns profitable due to the number of fraudulent/competitor clicks on my ads.

As far as I can see, Yahoo is doing nothing to stem this tide, and that’s why I’m not jumping for joy over this pretty new interface – MIVA (or Espotting for us old-school guys) looks pretty, but you know that 99% of the traffic is fake, which is why people struggle to make a £0.01 bid profitable with them – I don’t bother with them any more as I can just have a bonfire if I feel like burning money.

I’ll probably have a quick play around with some new ads when they do put me live on the new system, but until they address the click fraud problem, 90% of my time and money is going to the G.

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