Google AdWords vs. Yahoo! Search Marketing
Recently we’ve had the necessity to restructure several client keyword accounts in two of the PPC engines who are “major” players.
As anyone who is currently involved in PPC marketing knows by now… Yahoo! has completely revamped their PPC offering to advertisers - code named “Panama”.
Yahoo!’s new PPC system is very similar to the way that Google handles it’s AdWords service. Relevancy, determined according to each PPC engine’s algorithms, is now a factor in both how high you appear in the rankings and how much you pay for that click.
But what isn’t similar is the way that each company allows you to interface with their PPC system. During the course of reorganizing these accounts we have found some very distinct difference between dealing with these two companies.
Aside from customer service response times, relevancy issues, etc. I’d like to point to the available tools provided by both companies for handling massive and/or complete changes to an account. First we’ll look at Google AdWords :
Google AdWords
The offline tool provided by Google is the AdWords Editor. The tool, once installed on your computer, allows you to change bids, add/remove campaigns, adgroups and keywords and review performance of your account.
Adding the new account structure was quick and easy. We generated the new structure into the comma delimited format required. Copied and pasted it into the “add multiple keywords” form within AdWords Editor and hit “Finish”. A minute or so later the new structure was built in the Editor. A few more changes to enter the text ads into each new adgroup and set various preferences within the added campaigns and the whole thing was ready for posting to Google. Posting of the new changes was done within 10 minutes.
It was quite simple, within 3 hours the new campaigns, adgroups and keywords (even new keywords) were active. Wish the same could be said for Yahoo!.
Yahoo! Search Marketing
In order to make a bulk change to your account in Yahoo!; you’ve got to download their CSV format file which is a copy of your account’s campaigns, adgroups, ads and keywords. Make the desired changes - and upload the modified CSV file. After we downloaded and inspected one account’s CSV file it appeared that there were quite a few “holes” in the data, wherein some keywords were missing their unique tracking URLs (odd… in the online interface for the account they appear to be there). We shrugged it off since we were essentially rebuilding the accounts campaigns and ads anyway, we’d fix it as we went along.
Working with a CSV file of this size in Excel is very cumbersome, even if you have a large desktop area - it’s just too many columns to comfortably work with when you are dealing with thousands of rows worth of entries. A very poor way of dealing with the whole account - especially for a restructure/reorg. But we got it done.
When we attempted to upload the CSV file via Yahoo!’s interface it kept being rejected indicating that the format was incorrect. So, we downloaded Yahoo!’s bulk template ensured that our changes fit their format and tried again. Still no luck.
Next step was to open a customer support case and send them the file that way. The next day they responded to us saying that they could not open the file we provided. Baffled again, I sent the file to several people (each using different operating systems) and ALL were able to open the CSV file. So we aren’t real sure what the issue really is at Yahoo!.
Further calls to Yahoo! “Platinum” support this afternoon resulted in a promise of a return call within 20 minutes, but none was received.
This has been our experience - We’ll keep you posted as to what occurs with Yahoo! Search Marketing. In the meantime, we are happily making regular tweaks to the newly reorganized Google AdWords accounts.