Yahoo! Search Marketing Foolishness

I recently tried out Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) just to see what kind of traffic they could drive to my sites for a minimum buy of $30 dollars a month. The early results were okay. I averaged 5,000 impressions a day to return my self-imposed budget limit of 3 click-throughs per day (spending around a dollar a day) for a .37 cent bid for the "writing" keyword that would take people to my http://davidboles.com website. After a couple of weeks I decided I wanted to add a new Ad for this blog. I chose the keyword "blog" and bid .43 cents to get the first position in the Yahoo! Search Marketing return for my dollar-a-day budget of $30 a month. All Ads must be approved by Yahoo! Search Marketing before they go live and that takes up to four business days. Also, when you set up your Ad, the "computer editor" may disallow blacklisted words you might want to place in your Ad. "Coolest" and "Best" and "Greatest" and "Top" were all rejected by the Yahoo! Search Marketing robot content filter because my Ad suggested that I was trying to set myself apart by appearing to be the only choice in the category. Uh, "Duh!" Isn't that the point of advertising? If I didn't offer the best and the coolest and the greatest stuff that you can't find anywhere else why would I be writing this blog and why would you be reading it now? Since when did Advertising have to be bland and communal and no one can claim a top spot above another? Oh, you can claim the top spot in Yahoo! Search Marketing search returns by paying the highest bid fee, but if you choose words to claim the top spot you are rejected. I finally was able to craft a crafty and effective Ad for this blog that still claimed it was special and unique and I waited for Yahoo! Search Marketing editorial review to clear my Ad for placement. Four days later my Ad was rejected. The reason? The word "blog" as my keyword "did not apply to the content of the site" and would mislead visitors. I'm not going to cut up that idiotic reasoning here because you know exactly how ignorant and awful that decision was and it proves Yahoo! Search Marketing has absolutely no clue how blogs work on and interact with eyes on the internet. My main complaint about Yahoo! Search Marketing is not that they reject excellent Ads out-of-hand -- that goes without saying and I will say it again and again -- the thing that rakes me is the inability to immediately appeal stupid decisions with a human being. There is no option to appeal an editorial rejection. There is no phone number. There is no email address. There is no contact form. You just sit there searching for a way, any single way, to find a human being. Yahoo! Search Marketing offers no human contact and that bad business decision breeds hard feelings, frustration and a desire for revenge against wasted time as evidenced in this review. After four days of searching the Yahoo! Search Marketing site I finally found, hidden at the bottom of the page in really tiny print, a contact link. I decided had enough and I just wanted to entirely sever my rocky relationship. I told them to cancel my account. I heard nothing back for six days. I finally received an email -- from a human being -- who wanted me to call, at my own expense, to discus the issue of my cancellation. After a long and frustrating 20 minute phone call where I expressed the thoughts you are reading here, I think my account was cancelled. We'll see next month if my credit card is charged another $30 or not. Yahoo! Search Marketing is not for me. Google Advertising isn't much better. I think I'll stick with free self-promotion and self-search engine submissions because to pay for advertising search services on the web is to want a prickling experience that only serves to aggravate and advance the idea that human faces, and not computer forms, are absolutely required if you want to do well selling services on the internet.