Oh Yahoo, you’ve done it again. There was quite a bit of hubbub on the ol’ Intertrons for the last few days over a clause that Yahoo slipped into their search advertising Terms of Service agreements allowing them to fiddle about in advertiser’s search advertising campaigns. The collective cry of “Who elected you Don Draper?” has duly arisen, even in our own comments section.
While I hesitate to kick a search engine while it’s already rolling from side to side on the ground with its knees tucked in and its elbows over its ears there was an aspect of this seems under-reported. Namely – the fact that Yahoo’s meddling disproportionally affects small and medium sized advertisers.
To be blunt, our paid search clients were completely unaffected by this. Like most major agencies, we use insertion orders to place our ads on Yahoo. Yahoo’s changes don’t apply to insertion order buys.
So, simple solution: Use insertion orders, right? Not so fast.
For a small or medium sized advertiser insertion orders can suck up valuable time and resources. Even worse, folks I’ve heard from tell me that Yahoo gives them a lot of push-back when they try to transition to insertion orders, hitting them with spam and phone calls attempting to talk them out of it.
We disagree with the notion that Google or Yahoo or anyone other than the advertiser or marketer knows best about how to maximize the effectiveness of a given campaign. After all, your goals as an advertiser may not always be what a third party might imagine them to be. A search engine advertising campaign may include variables beyond maximizing your click-through rate that the engines don’t pay attention to.
I can imagine the thinking that went on at Yahoo HQ – Google keeps trying to give smaller advertiser’s the tools that an agency would normally provide, why don’t we? And if we can make more money off of it, even better!
Except that Google gives advertiser’s large and small the ability to opt in to most of their tools. When a change in policy is enacted (like the recent changes in quality score calculations) Google takes pains to make sure their advertisers are informed. Yahoo makes it onerous to opt out of a tool that seems designed to enhance their own bottom line more than their users end goals.
For advertisers who prefer a DIY approach this will only solidify the preference for Google, which is simpler to use and more transparent in comparison to Yahoo. How bewildering must Yahoo’s interference be to an advertiser who is new to the search space? Are they likely to want to continue on with that kind of user experience, given a choice? I’d think not.
For those who have the budget to go with an agency I can’t help but think that this reinforces the difficulty in self-managing sophisticated search marketing campaigns. The ability to set up highly targeted integrated campaigns that map to your company’s goals takes time, skill and effort. A search engine simply isn’t a replacement for a good advertising agency or marketing firm.
Thoughts or comments? Leave them in the comments section or send me a message on Twitter at @nmallin.
