When you’re managing 30+ Yahoo Sponsored Search accounts, you tend to get a lot of administrative and marketing mail from them. Though I do my best to keep apprised of the latest changes in their service, there’s just too much information to care about all of the time. For example, they’ve been running a webinar series for making the most out of your campaigns, which, as PPC Hero cares to point out in good detail, can be a mixed bag of advice.
So why did my eyebrow raise to see that Yahoo will now offer me $20 as a thank-you gift for attending the webinar and then filling out the survey? A gift which I can get up to three times?
The reason I’m not attending these webinars is not because I need $20, but because my perception of time/value is just not there… and $20 sure isn’t changing anything. I even think their webinars are GREAT… for the right market.
For example, look at the titles of these:
How to Create Successful Campaigns
How to Create Successful Keywords and Ads
How to Improve your Ad Quality
All nice topics, covering some pretty hearty stuff like geo-targeting, automatic keyword insertion, landing page quality, and other factors that effect the success of a campaign. The problem is, I already know all this, which means that as many pieces as Yahoo sends my way, I’m still not going to be interested.
Missing the Boat
My frustration with Yahoo’s service, especially compared with Google’s, is their failure to provide powerful tools for account managers like myself. The topic of these webinars and the frequency of their appearing in my inbox is just more evidence of that.
Where’s my offline editor for managing multiple ad campaigns across several accounts?
Where’s my master account so I can easily review the status of multiple clients?
When can I pull reports for multiple accounts automatically, based on specified parameters?
While I appreciate Yahoo’s effort to keep customers apprised of how to make their campaign work for them, my feeling is that they’re doing so as the expense of professionals who need more than what you’ll get out of an hour-long slideshow.
