Forum Moderators: open
- One client sells allergy products. Keywords having to do with cat and dog allergies and dander are approved, however keywords with the words "pet" and "animal" are disapproved for relevance. Last I checked, dogs and cats were animals, and often pets.
- Another client sells a product that contains the word "gun" in it (it's a widely used industry standard term). The account, the website, the landing page, the ad group name and the campaign name make it very obvious what the product is and that it has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of a firearm, yet all the keywords are declined as inappropriate.
- This same client was declined for the keyword "widget supplies" on the basis of relevance. The NAME of the company and the website is widgetsupplies.com; their landing page has nothing BUT hundreds of widget supplies, and they have been advertising over two thousand widget supplies products in Yahoo since 2002 when it was Overture. Moreover, apparently "widget products" and "widget equipment" are perfectly ok.
Give me a break! Ok, maybe it is all automated, but why should I have to jump through all these extra hoops to get my keywords into Yahoo? I'm trying to think of a reason why I shouldn't just pull all YSM client accounts out and toss their budgets over to Google, and at the moment, nothing's coming to mind.
Yahoo - if you are out there - until you find a way to make my job easier and not harder, you will never even come close to being competitive with Google.
This is ridiculous.
I've noticed that sometimes keywords are disapproved AUTOMATICALLY, by the way.
Not surprisingly, it never happened to me that a keyword that was automatically disapproved, was approved later on, on the manual check that I *assume* they do.
Does anyone know how the approval process work there? Seems like no one's home for a long long time.
Assaf
My latest Yahoo editorial exhibition of stupidity:
One of our clients is a well-known brand of consumer electronics. Counterfeit versions of one of its best known and most expensive models have infiltrated the distribution chain, particularly ebay, but they're showing up in legitimate retail stores. The counterfeit product is, of course substandard. One upside of this is that the product now sells especially well on the manufacturer's own website because buyers are assured of getting the genuine product.
The counterfeit problem is moderately well known to the public, causing lots of searches on terms such as "fake model#".
YSM's editors won't let the manufacturer advertise on these terms. First they argued that the advertising was prohibited because they have rules against advertising counterfeit goods. These are indeed in their guidelines. But when I pointed out that there was nothing in their published guidelines prohibiting the use of these keywords, they then came back and denied the keywords again because we were selling the genuine product, and therefore the ad was not relevant to people searching for information about the counterfeit product.
Meanwhile, people are searching for information about the counterfeit product so they can learn how to avoid buying a counterfeit, when there's a simple solution: Buy directly from the manufacturer. But, Yahoo won't let the manufacturer tell people that this is possible.
