I received 2 e-mails from Yahoo yesterday.

The first one at 8.58 AM advised me to rush to my account as "minimum bids have been increased" and I may have some inactive.

At 1.22 PM another e-mail arrived telling me to rush to my account because "minimum bids have been decreased" and some of my keywords which were previously inactive are now active and I should revise my bids.

What a joke. My spend has fallen so low that I won't even take the time to check it out. Their website so slow & unfriendly that it's just not worth my time. It stills shows my balance from the last time I logged in with no way to refresh it. I have to op[en 2 or 3 pages first before it finally updates to the current balance.

Just too stupid. I check my AdWords spend & results daily. Fast site. Easy to use. Good results. Updated every few minutes. What more could you ask

This brings us to tonight's word: PEBBLES!

I can totally relate, as of today I'm cutting spending in half, as I am following the people who started lowering bids to the minimum and let the system drown in it's own pool of greed and user abuse & lay on the pebbles on the bottom.

I mean - even the "recent maximum bids" for a certain keyword are changing every second. Checking once - it's 24¢. Then a minute later - 22¢. Then a minute later - $2.42. For us it's money, but for Y it's just pebbles.

We are not stupid. Now Pete (or whoever) will throw pebbles at us, telling us that some bugs have been reported, but the technical team isn't available (or whatnot).

What I'm saying is this: Every time bids stabilize, Y violently sinks a fistful of pebbles into the pool we're in, to make us row harder (and bid higher) to stay head over water (and inside the budget)

Who's to say anything about reliability of Y's info, or the truly tiny size of the pebbles who start all them ripples...

And that's the word!

I am really sick of Yahoo's Search Marketing and i'm cutting my budget in half as of today. I have been spending more and more, and getting fewer and fewer conversions. The interface has always been slow but at least my patience paid off with good looking stats. I spent the same amount in October on Yahoo as I did with Adwords and literally made 10 times on Adwords what I made on Yahoo. I don't know much longer I need to hesitate before it slaps me in the face.

Count me among the frustrated. My ROI has dropped considerably after the previous round of changes. I think once my balance runs out, I'm done with Y.

I only started advertising again on Y since I focused a lot on G. I made a good start and after days of getting my conversions, Y is increasing SS min bid everyday... Count me in!

Yahoo's system for minimum bids is sucking away at everyone's profit margin. For a whole ton of my keywords, minimum bids are between 1% and 10% higher than my actual bids. So I see things like:

current bid: $0.74
new minimum bid: $0.80

All over my account its like this. Then if you increase your bid, a month later, the new minimum bid goes up another 5%. Well, at $0.74 Yahoo is already taking about 80% of my margin (per click). As these minimums go up, it gets closer and closer to the level where its just not worth advetisers time or effort to keep these campaigns going. Over the past year or so, low quality partners and minimum bids have combined to turn many of my campaigns unprofitable so the only recourse is to shut them down. Its only a matter of time before the advertisers who are not tracking as thoroughly as many of us are realize that are losing money and stop their campaigns as well. When this happens, Yahoo is screwed.

Not too say that you shouldn't test Yahoo as my biggest campaigns are doing very well. But I fear that soon, Yahoo will figure out a way to try squeeze every nickel from me that I am making on these products too until its no longer worth it to advertise there at all.

I can see that one. Recently I looked at the historical data of my keywords and I just got disappointment of what Y has been doing. Just like you, I tried increasing bids because i feel good about the conversions that i got on my previous bids and hoping that if i bid more, i get more but after i increased bids, Y will also increase your minimum bid.

I had one or two of these. Not a big deal at all in my case. What did get me is the fact that, during the last three months, the cost on Yahoo has continually been growing without me changing anything much. It doubled in September (100% up - compared to August), and then it went up for another 30% in Oct (compared to September).
My first action was going to Standard (from Advance). Way back, since the upgrade, I run most of the things in Standard and had it under control. Then I switched to Advanced (in some cases) so I could analyze and figure if that brings any good. ... and I never did it. My focus is on Google and I check Yahoo intermittently.
Because Yahoo does not know how to surprise its customers in a nice way, I must reduce the money I spend there, and continue spending most of my time on Google.

Traffic from Yahoo paid search seems to be too dirty, as it comes from many irrelevant sites being treated as search, including Yahoo’s own sites like news and whatever else. Search should be search only.

I believe that the cost increase and all what’s going around with minimum bids, that’s all connected to whatever is happening behind Yahoo’s HQ door.

Are you listening, Susan and Jerry? You see a trend emerging here?

YHOO @ 11.19, lowest since early 2003. Keep ignoring your advertisers.

I keep raising the really important bids, but I can't keep up with all the raises & can't really afford to... As soon as I'm starting to show loss, Yahoo will be another account poorer...

I had a bunch of my top keywords jumped by over 2 times.

Strange because I'm the only advertiser for those keywords, and my quality score is 4-5 bars with an average 15-20% clickthru.

I was so busy setting right bid for some of my top performing keywords. I started it with a certain bid amount and got good number of conversions. I was thinking if i raise bids then maybe i get more but Y is just keeping my cost high and not that much conversions. It's like Y is giving me a limit of what i can get everyday.

ppc newbie, I'm afraid these price hikes are nothing to do with relevance, quality score or your click thru' rate.

They have to try and save the sinking stock one way or another, to bad rip-off the advertisers is they way they decided to go. I can't believe not a single genious at Yahoo said, "hey, if we rip-off the advertisers, they won't advertise!".

We dont' any more. At least not with Yahoo anyways. Their quality and conversion rates for us were not worth paying unjustified CPC costs.

[edited by: werty at 4:06 am (utc) on Nov. 18, 2008]
[edit reason] Changed some of the language. See TOS #3 [/edit]

Y has left its advertisers to 3 options.
1) pay up for the key terms.
2) close account.
3) don't advertise on the key terms they raised.

I noticed my campaigns deteriorate several months ago. I was going to close up my accounts but I basically played the game that Y left open to me. I didn't advertise on any key terms that were raised. I found other outlets for Y's previous budget.

I didn't advertise on any key terms that were raised.

I'm also doing the same thing.

Raise the bar & I put the money in AdWords.

I don't know if anybody else is seeing this, but YSM should take note - I have seen a lot of my keywords across most of my campaigns with G now with minimum bids of 5-6c a click! and they are maintaining their position at that! maybe it's a move designed to counter the loss of advertisers during this difficult economic period, who knows. But YSM is blindly continuing to 'crank up' many of my established keywords with them to 25c + minimum bid. That's fine, let them get on with it, there is much better traffic volume, a way better ppc system (which they still haven't caught up with after all these years of ppc being in place) and more importantly - better conversion to be had with G. In reality, I really do want Y to be a serious player in this market because that (should) keep our prices down and all of them on their toes so to speak. Long term, it's not good to have one major player in any market but Y just do not seem 'switched on' enough to step up to the challenge. I can only speak for the UK but we have seen a higher profile tv campaign from ASK promoting their search product, be nice to see the same from Y but then they probably can't afford it right now.

Here's even more ridiculous - I'm in position two on a very high traffic keyword and only paying $.19 per click. The keyword averages hundreds of clicks per week and thousands during peaks months. The min bid for the keyword is $.19. How can I be in position two, be at my min bid, and have ten other advertisers on the first page on the same keyword?