Yahoo! SM ignoring my budget?

[kylegetson]

Ive been using Yahoo! Search marketing for while now, with few problems, but recently Yahoo! has been ignoring my set budgets. This is the 2nd time this month. The first time my daily budget was exceeded by over 300% and this time it was by about 200%. I called Yahoo! both times and was credited the overage, but had I not caught it, Id be out that money. And this time after explaining this was the 2nd time around they gave me an additional $25 credit. Luckily this is one of my smaller accounts, but I have serious concerns about this. I have checked my other accounts and have not seen this anywhere else.

I manage a lot of PPC accounts, and if I can't trust Yahoo! to keep the budget I set I am in some trouble. Anyone else have similar issues?

[BossWebmaster]

Yahoo's marketing program sucks. I know I'm being general, but it's true for every aspect of it. ROI sucks. User interface sucks. Features are inferior to AdWords and therefore suck. We eventually just canceled it completely and dumped that budget into AdWords, and my life was much nicer after that.

[erima]

I have actually had this problem with Yahoo and MSN.
It seems that their real time accounting program is only "sort of real time"

My solution was very simple. I disputed the charge based on the fact that they violated their own service agreement!

What advertisers don't realize when they allow a flaw in their system to blast through our advertising budget, is that they reduce the ROI for companies that otherwise might become long term advertisers. It is easy for me to recommend that a company starts a ppc program, but it always is based on constant monitoring of the ads and making sure that the ad and landing page are optimized and getting the highest possible conversion rates. If you only have $X.XX dollars to spend, you are counting on the features of the system to allow you to set a daily budget and adjust if you are not achieving your desired results.

If they can't get the budget feature to work properly ... don't offer it.

[Mary Bowling]

I have had so much trouble with this that I've had to take clients with smallish budgets off of Yahoo altogether and spend more money in AdWords.

Yahoo does suck and they will not take any responsibility for any of their bad behavior. They regularly went over the set budget for one client by 20% per month and blamed it on me because "the terms were expensive". They finally gave the guy a refund, but only because I made such a persistent pain of myself. They never admitted that they were the problem and that their system doesn't work right.

I have no suggestions for you other than to vote with your money and walk away from Yahoo ppcs. Sorry.

[optimalwebsite]

Does anyone else think some fo the big IT companies have some sort of sales etiquette problem? Almost as part of their cultural fabric, I mean, as if they have no idea of customer service. In any other industry if this happened you'd expext a refund of the overspend as a bare minimum...

I don't buy into the "sort of real time programming problem, Yahoo made a mistake" excuse at all... I'd say Yahoo probably do this simply to make more money.

Grrr...

it makes me angry!!


Joel

[reggsenterprises]

I too have experienced the same problem with Yahoo over and over again. They use the excuse that they spread your budget over a month's time. Unfortunately, their system doesn't take into account that you can use up that entire budget in 1 day. By the time their system catches the overage, it's much too late. They will refund the overage if you request/demand it. I would hate to imagine how many customers do not realize it and overpay.

It finally got so bad that we have discontinued using Yahoo until such time that their system has improved. It is obvious that they have not addressed this problem since it's been close to a year now since we stopped using them. Our experiences with their customer service is that they do not see it as a problem at all.

We have not experienced the same problems with MSN and only spotty instances with Google.

[RegDCP]

Does anyone else think some fo the big IT companies have some sort of sales etiquette problem? Almost as part of their cultural fabric, I mean, as if they have no idea of customer service. In any other industry if this happened you'd expext a refund of the overspend as a bare minimum...

I don't buy into the "sort of real time programming problem, Yahoo made a mistake" excuse at all... I'd say Yahoo probably do this simply to make more money.

Grrr...

it makes me angry!!


Joel

Makes me angry too Joel and it is not just the IT companies that practice this.

I'm a gamer.
When I am not doing webwork, SEO, marketing, schmoozing network buddies, I like to race.
My primary computer is a dual core intel with 2 gigs Kingston DDR2 ram, 2x 8800GTS in SLI (1280 Meg combined ram), and 2 320 gig drives setup to dual boot.

My gaming OS is clean and only has a very meager amount of programs running, all drivers up to date and benchmarks 11,872 in 3D mark 06.
I recently bought Atari's Test Drive Unlimited and consider it a beta release.
After literally MONTHS of false promises and THOUSANDS of posts they released a patch.
I should say a mostly useless patch which was supposed to deal with some stuttering and rendering problems, but didn't.
During all of this the company had one poor soul doing damage control on the forums. It will be a long time before I consider another Atari Product.

EA is almost as bad.
Most companies don't seem to give a hoot, once they have your money.

Reg

[RichAtVNS]

I had the same issue a few years ago and dumped them when they stopped refunding the requested amounts back.

Note I also saw that it happened mostly because of click fraud.

They refused to terminate the offending affiliates even though I identified them. They claimed my account was not being charged for clicks from those affiaites, but my tracking logs told me they were lying.

To this day I still have all the tracking data and am waiting for the right lawyer to take up the cause.

[davidmg]

Look who owns Yahoo!!!!! Have you ever had any luck getting anywhere with the phone comapany??? They over billed me for 8 months in a row after complaining every month they sent out a refund check 6 months later and countless phone calls going from person to person to voicemail etc. Why would they care what happens with Yahoo???? The government broke up ma bell now they are all merging back together as att???

[deepsand]

1) Any ad publisher, be it Yahoo, Google, etc., cannot exercise absolute control over when and where your ads are displayed, owing to the fact that such are displayed by any number of affiliates, not just by themselves alone. When your budget limit is reached, or being reached, those affiliates must be notified to cease displaying your ads. Unfortunately, not all affiliates are as co-operative in this regard as one might expect, as they have an economic incentive to continue to display as many ads as possible.

Google clearly states that such over-runs can and probably will happen, and that they will attempt to adjust your display rates in subsequent days so as to achieve an average daily spend that does not exceed your stated budget; they do not guarantee that no day's spend will exceed your budget. Furthermore, if in any billing cycle the total spend exceeds an amount equal to your daily limit multiplied by the number of days in such billing cycle, they will automatically credit your account for such excess.

2) I've used Yahoo/Overture for several years with no appearance of the problem that you describe. This might owe to the fact that I do not use Content Match. I early on observed that too many affiliates who displayed Content Match ads, including some "big names" such as ESPN, were not merely less than sufficiently scrupulous, but were blatantly & deliberately displaying Search Match listing as though they were Content Match ones. Once I opted out of the Content Match network, such ceased to occur.

If you are using Content Match, stop; that's were most of the rip-offs occur.

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