Yahoo and MSN, are they worth the effort?

**grobinso** · 14-02-08

Hi just wondered what your opinions were on Yahoo and MSN and how they rate in terms of traffic in comparison to Adwords. I have accounts on both of them but to be honest have never been able to really get a campaign up and runing properly due to the painfully slow 'Editorial Review' process they seem to have.

One site i run sells ladies thongs and out of about 120 keywords i submitted to Yahoo for review, the one keyword they 'failed' to even bother review was 'thongs' What good is that ? and it took about 5 days for them to review the others. If i had been running a short promotion, say over a weekend it would have been finished before the review had taken place!

I have also had top 5 organic positions for several of my keywords on both Yahoo and MSN through SEO and the traffic from them has been negligible.

Do you see decent trafic from them using PPC? and do you think i should give them another chance? Yahoo sent me an email yesterday saying 'We want you back' and offering me a £60 voucher (of course i have to deposit an equal amount with them first ) , what do you reckon ?
Thanks in advance

Graham

**mktcm2** · 14-02-08

Originally Posted by grobinso

Hi just wondered what your opinions were on Yahoo and MSN and how they rate in terms of traffic in comparison to Adwords. I have accounts on both of them but to be honest have never been able to really get a campaign up and runing properly due to the painfully slow 'Editorial Review' process they seem to have.

One site i run sells ladies thongs and out of about 120 keywords i submitted to Yahoo for review, the one keyword they 'failed' to even bother review was 'thongs' What good is that ? and it took about 5 days for them to review the others. If i had been running a short promotion, say over a weekend it would have been finished before the review had taken place!

I have also had top 5 organic positions for several of my keywords on both Yahoo and MSN through SEO and the traffic from them has been negligible.

Do you see decent trafic from them using PPC? and do you think i should give them another chance? Yahoo sent me an email yesterday saying 'We want you back' and offering me a £60 voucher (of course i have to deposit an equal amount with them first ) , what do you reckon ?
Thanks in advance

Graham

Hi Graham

As you may know it well yourself Yahoo is not that popular in the UK and generally in most of the EU countries (I'm saying this out of my recent research which I'm still conducting). The amount you spend on Yahoo I think is not wise enough due to its lack of popularity amongst UK customers and EU folks in general. However if you mean cross atlantic expansions Yahoo is good for awareness and positioning your brands even further.

MSN is worth continuing business with but you need to be careful about the leads you get from there as majority of MSN users are not simply customers they are normal visitors. This is what I learned when I was working in the City. I don't mean to sound like lecturing but you may need to define your market and customers again before making a decision on what online search engine you are going to use for your ROI.

Hope this helpped and wish you good luck and have a good weekend.

**Omicrontau** · 20-02-08

I ran a Yahoo campaign over Valentine's Day and have to say that Yahoo delivered far more sales than Google and it was money well spent. I didn't get a chance to test Adcenter but will do so with a Mothers Day promo I'm now doing.

Although Yahoo has an editorial process, I've found you can have campaigns up in the same day. Yahoo is also cheaper. I've not queried anything yet but support seems to respond within 24-48 hours so its worth asking why your main keyword was rejected (or not reviewed as the case may be).

I have to disagree about Yahoo not being that widely used in the UK because my campaigns success was due to Yahoo and the search volume for my keywords was there.

The thins I don't understand that well is how Yahoo broad matches terms. Anyone has insight on this?

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**Jon Hobbs** · 27-02-08

We prefer to use Adwords simply because the interface is better and it's easier to get campaigns up and running and edit them. I'd be interested to know what kind of results others get from competing PPC search engines.

**KirstyM** · 27-02-08

I do actually find Yahoo and MSN can contribute very, very decent revenue streams to my affiliate business. However, that is because I can pick and choose my affiliate offers to feature there.

I must say that they don't seem to work for every sector (and I think that has to do with their keyword matching techniques). If you are in a single sector or a merchant, they may well be a bit hit and miss!

**tbp** · 27-02-08

I used Adcenter for the first time last Friday, and it's been a complete waste of time!

Had problems at first, as their adcenter advertising site that gives out a voucher code for first time users only generates expired codes that don't work. Phoned Microsoft and it turns out they all know about the problem, yet are happy to leave the site up without any warnings that it's broken.

Set up my account, and didn't get the normal signup emails until 3 days later, so no explanation as to what was going on. My account was stuck in "checking credit status" mode for 6 hours, even though the payment went through on my card fine. Then took another 8 hours to for my ad's to start running.

I`m using the same keywords as on Google Adwords, and paying so that my advert is in number 1 position every time the keywords are searched.

However, in the 5 days now its been live, Adwords has generated over 1000 impressions, whereas Adcenter has managed 14! (and half of those were me checking to see if the ad's were running properly). Had 2 clicks in 5 days, and spent a grand total of 14p, compared to around £20 on adwords.

I don't know whether i`m particularly unlucky, but the search volumes on there seem miniscule in terms of what google generates.

Very disapointed in the whole experience, must have spent about 6 hours setting things up and figuring it out, all for 14 impressions and 2 clicks!

Did realise that it was going to be anywhere near google in terms of volume, but suprised how far it does actually fall behind them.

**mainlime** · 27-02-08

My current opinion on Microsoft Adcenter is that I'd be better off spending the time sticking forks in my eyes. It would also be slightly less painful.

Yahoo is a bit of a mixed bag. Whilst I've certainly never managed to get the volume I can with Adwords, Yahoo can be useful for some markets. For example, Yahoo still allow gambling ads which Google won't touch with a very long barge pole. As Kirsty says above you can sometimes see a better conversion ratio on Yahoo campaigns than on Google.

I saw some research the other day which claimed that Yahoo users were more blue collar than Google's which may go some way to explaining the difference in what they buy.

Experiment. (But not with the forks and the eyes)

**sem4u** · 28-02-08

I can't stand Yahoo at the moment...for many reasons...I do like running ads on MSN though.

**grobinso** · 29-02-08

Hi all, thanks for the replies.

Well i thought i would give Yahoo another go and last week set a few campaigns up in widely differring sectors. Have to say that most went live almost immediately , however one of them was in the more Adult sector and it took some hours before it was reviewed.

When they finally got round to looking at it they refused the ad on a minor point, so i resubmitted the ad and waited for it to be reviewed, and waited and waited and ...

i could tell from my site logs that they revisited the site several times that same day yet by lunchtime the next day it was still sitting in pending, no update or anything.

I wrote a nice letter explaining my concern at the time it took to review 1 ad and probably by co-incidence it actually went live a few hours later. As for my letter , it took them 5 days to write back to me explaining their 'Editorial process' could take 3-5 days !!

Considering the amount of money they must be making from us, you would think they would be able to do a bit better than this.

I think i will stick to Adwords until they decide to get serious about what they are doing.

Cheers

Graham

So

**tijan** · 01-03-08

Originally Posted by Omicrontau

Although Yahoo has an editorial process, I've found you can have campaigns up in the same day. Yahoo is also cheaper.
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Can someone confirm that bold face is true?. I have never been able to get around setting campaign with yahoo in $, everytime i tried its always £ and to me that is enough a judgement to say that yahoo is expensive. I never used em cause of that singular fact.

I would love to know how to get around that.