Warning: Yahoo Automatically Spends Your Money for You?

Yahoo seems to think that they know what's best for your marketing campaign, so much so in fact, that they will now go INTO your account, change your ads, create ads, and change all of your budgets...for your convenience of course.

Al Scillitani is pretty ticked off about it.

Apparently, all of this is OK because Yahoo sent all of its Search Marketing customers an e-mail informing them that they need to "opt out" of this "service"...

Yahoo! is committed to the success of account [account name] and we believe there is an opportunity to provide you with improved performance.

To help you save time and get the most out of your campaigns, we are launching a new automatic account optimization program. It’s intended to help raise the performance of accounts that are experiencing issues like low quality scores, low lead volume or low click-through rates.

And the best part is, we will do the work for you: Our content developers will use their search advertising experience to help your marketing dollars go further.

What we will keep an eye out for:
- Search ads with low click-through rates relative to competitors
- Ad testing not in use? missing an opportunity to optimize ad copy
- Ad groups that have a quality index score of 2 or lower

How we can help:
- Create new ads for existing ad groups, enabling ad testing
- Write multiple versions of ads for any new ad groups we create, enabling the use of ad testing to help ensure that the best-performing ads are displayed more often
- Search our database for keywords that can drive more targeted traffic to your site

In short, our goal is to make sure that your account is firing on all cylinders–and do this while keeping your existing keywords and without exceeding your spending limits!

As always, you are in control of your account. If we make any optimization changes to your account through this program, we will notify you by email, and you can let us know whether the account changes are positively affecting your account. Also, you are welcome to contact your account manager to review, edit or ask us to reverse any of the changes. Finally, if you do not wish to participate in this program, you may opt out by contacting your account manager.

We’ve identified keywords and ads in your account that are significantly underperforming, and we’ve initiated the changes to the creatives that you will find attached.

We are very excited about this new program, and hope it will provide you with improved performance and a higher level of service. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Wow, thanks Yahoo.  For a minute there I thought I would have to be the one in charge of my money and campaigns...whew!

If you are a YSM client, I recommend that you contact your account manager, or click the 'contact' link in your account, and let Yahoo know that you do not want to be part of this program.

Hey, I guess this is one way for them to get their stock price up!

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Technorati Tags: Advertising, PPC, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing

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