What Yahoo! Search Can Learn from Google

May 2nd, 2006 Jackie

About 85% of my day is spent managing paid search campaigns for various clients. For large campaigns, I deal with Yahoo! Search and Google as a typical media agency.

We issue IOs which have the campaign dates and amounts and then we are billed monthly based on actual media spend. This gives us a couple of advantages to prepaying or having a credit card charged every time a campaign balance is low.

1. We are not actually committed to spend the IO amount. We can throttle down the campaign if we meet our campaign goals from other media sources.
2. We can never overspend. Our campaign will go down until the next IO is created. This obviously takes some campaign management to prevent any down-time, but the tradeoff is that we never exceed our budget which can easily happen if a credit card is being charged automatically.

What works in our favor, is not necessarily in Yahoo’s best interest however and this is clear when dealing with Yahoo as an invoiced client.  Yahoo is really not set up to handle invoicing in a rational customer-friendly manner. Their system is very much the same as it was eight years ago - built upon self-serve advertising which enables you to start a camaign and pay for it without ever having to speak with a Yahoo employee.

Ah, the good old days.

Piss Poor Customer Service

As an agency advertiser, I occasionally have reason to call Yahoo and discuss a campaign issue or problem (generally relating to the IO process). When this happens, I get a different person each time I call. Even if I request the same person, I am told “I can help you with this.” Why do I get shuffled around from drone to drone? Because I am only a “premium” customer as opposed to “Gold” or “Platinum.” My agency does not spend enough money to warrant our own customer service representative. Yet.

This system of shuffling the consumer around from one rep to another would be fine if it worked. But it does NOT work. Campaigns go dark. IOs must be refaxed again and again (we had to fax the SAME IO 4 times last month). When campaigns go dark it makes me look bad. It makes my agency look bad and it makes the client very unhappy.

Plus it’s money lost. Why would Yahoo turn away money? Because of comical incompetence? Perhaps. More like a smug certainty that they will always attract advertisers simply because they’re Yahoo, man! They’re search! They’re the only OTHER tier one engine.

Enter Google

Oh the relief! Dealing with Google is like applying ice to my bruised and battered skull (bruised from repeatedly hitting it against the wall when trying to deal with Yahoo).

Google does the following:

1. Assigns dedicated customer service reps for both billing and campaign management needs
2. Creates the IOs themselves (we have to fill out our own IOs for Yahoo, which they then promptly lose)
3. Checks in with us if the campaign budget gets low or if the campaign (heaven forbid) is dark
4. Does not make us feel guilty for having less than 200K per month to spend on search.

Their user interface kicks ass too. It’s easy to launch a campaign. Easy to generate a report. Easy to stop and start groups of keywords or ads. As a result, I routinely recommend spending more money on Google and, in fact, my agency spends about FIVE TIMES the amount on Google as they do on Yahoo. To some clients, it’s all “search” and they will follow the recommendation of allocating more to one vendor than another based on the agency’s expertise.

So, Yahoo, if you’re listening - shape up. As a media planner and search marketer, I have the power to put more of my client’s media dollars into Google, or MSN or [insert new tier I search vendor to replace Yahoo here].

I get better customer service from my cell phone company than I do from Yahoo - and that’s without planning to spend $100,000 (or more) on cell phone service this year. 

posted by Jackie

Entry Filed under: PPC Advice