Yes, I saw it. It is live. Experiencing some difference – can’t say much right now. I hope they don’t increase our bids so high that it becomes increasingly difficult to advertise on Yahoo!

As with most advertisers, ROI with YSM is bare minimum, and now if they try to extract more money from Advertisers, probably many will stop their ads with Yahoo and look elsewhere.

I hope some rep of YSM is listening and understands our problem.

Feeling very worried!

I dumped them back when they became Overture and never looked back... the Yahoo name isn't helping much... even with Google I'm about to call it quits when i find my organic search engine traffic converting five to one compared to my paid Google traffic! If my conversion rate from their traffic was the same as organic I'd be profiting for their traffic, but as their quality is so low I'm not...

I checked a few keywords that would be good prospects for min bid increase and they are all still at .10. Hopefully Yahoo will make their changes gradually.

KFish - I agree with you. I'm hoping that this will open up some keywords that arent worth 10 cents though.

I would like to check my ads but cannot remember the user name of my account anymore...

Actually I cannot even remember when I logged in the last time to check my ads. Is the new interface on already?

looks like the variable bids are live.. so far all of mine are still at .10..

I see this figure per keyword in the UI, but is it available per keyword via the reports?

Hey there!
Since we're close to launching minimum bid changes, some advertisers may notice user interface changes. We expect the actual bid changes to go live soon.
Thanks for the feedback!
YahooPete

I wonder if they are expecting to make more money from this or are actually interested in improving the search results (ads). I know for me my ROI is so low I couldn't pay any more if I wanted to, my keywords will just go inactive.

yahoo just raised my minimum bids by 3 -4 times on many keywords.. they must be out of their minds..

Yes, I can see it’s now live:

[ysmblog.com...]

They have increased my bids by 2-3 times.

I have decided not to increase my bids.

Google was impossible. And now Yahoo. Where to go?

Small business advertisers like me will be highly affected by this. Why can’t Yahoo understand that many advertisers cannot afford to increase their bids because it won’t work on their ROI. I presume most were already paying what they could.

I wonder who has benefited. Yahoo or Advertisers or the Users?

[edited by: KFish at 8:13 am (utc) on April 18, 2008]

Yahoo is obviously trying to improve relevancy and I can't blame them. They lose search users when their serp (ads included) are irrelevant to what the user searched for.

The problem is, the organic side is worse than the ads... they should be trying to figure out organic search relevancy before spending time on this.

My response? Delete all ads that Yahoo "stupid-prices".

Oops - I get an internal error - can't delete them! Thanks, Yahoo.

I received the email notice & went to my account to check it out.

What a pain in the a..!

Their system is so slow that after going through a few ad groups I gave up.

I found one term that went from 10¢ to 70¢. What a laugh.

I am on DSL so it's not my connection - it's just stupid slow & you have to drill down through so many levels to get the info you need. NOT going to do it. Not worth the time or effort.

Every time they send me a low balance e-mail I just about give up. The balance on the first page reflects the last time you visited the site NOT the current balance. You can't refresh it. You have to open 3 or 4 new pages & then go back to the control panel. Just so stupid! I complained to them about 4 months ago about this & they advised me to just keep opening new pages until it finally updates.

Give me a break!

It's begun in my account as well.

The keywords they have raised the min bids of are just going to have to remain inactive. I refuse to raise them up and kill my ROI,so they'll just have to remain inactive.

First Google and now Yahoo... personally, I'm sick of being bullied by these companies and if they want to turn away my advertising dollars so be it. My money, and time, is better spent elsewhere.

As others have said, our ROI with Yahoo is minimal. They now want at least double what we were paying, so those keywords will just become inactive since we can't afford to pay anymore. Besides, their interface is so archaic that it's too much of a pain to change bids even if we wanted to do so.

Count me among those who are unhappy. Minimum bids for many of my keywords are going up 3-4x. And I was getting clicks at the former bids. So let me see if I have this right: I have to pay more in order to get the same thing I got before? That makes no sense to me. Believe it or not, I had been getting better results from Yahoo than from Google. I can't afford these new minimums, though, so where do I go?

So glad that I get to foot the bill for Yahoo fending off Microsoft.

Kinda silly - I'm getting minbids that are low and some that are high. There doesn't seem to be any relevancy related to the changes.

Add me to the unhappy list. No increase in service, no 'yahoo editor' software, no increase in quality. Just an increase in price? Very poor. Yahoo could have cleaned up due to the constant google changes, but they're making things worse.

Okay, now I'm even more frustrated. I had previously upped one of my bids to the new minimum. But when I just checked my account, the minimum has gone up again. What the heck is going on? Are they going to keep raising the minimums over and over?

peggster is that really happening? Yahoo is giving us sleepless nights.

Elric99 I totally agree with you. I am advertising with Yahoo since the last 4 years, and still Yahoo has a lot to do before it earns my respect.

Ahh, Yahoo what a way to stick it to your business. I'm in the same boat as the rest of you. My ROI was very minimal before. I can't justify click prices that are twice as much let a lone 3 times as much as some of my keywords are now. It's funny though, the keywords that don't have as much to do with my business the cost is low but the keywords that are 100% relevant to my website, ads etc.. have gone through the roof.

I don't understand how people can make money at some of these prices. They must be advertising at a loss. No ones going to raise their prices to meet these minimums and the ones who do are just going to go through their ad budget like crazy since no one else is advertising and they are getting all these expensive clicks.

What the heck is going on? Are they going to keep raising the minimums over and over?

If they can!

Well, it's still happening. They've now raised the minimum bids on nearly half of my keywords; some are as much as 3 times what they were before. I just sent them a message asking why I should continue to do business with them. Doubt I'll get a response, but we'll see.

I've tried AdWords, and it doesn't work as well for me. What other alternatives should I consider?

It happen last week to me too.

>>What other alternatives should I consider?

How's your organic rankings these days?

How's your organic rankings these days?

Not great. Maybe my time (and money) would be better spent working on content so I can improve that.

the change is now complete... If your bids are over 50 cents, you should have seen an increase. I saw a few thousand KWs go inactive, but that is kind of a rounding error for me.

If you need to balance out your Yahoo average cpc: Expand your KW base. Go after 3 word KWs. Use the Yahoo API to make sure you are buying KWs that have traffic. Do not load up your accounts with junk.