I upgraded to the new Yahoo Search Marketing platform a few days ago. After an impatient 8 hour weight whilst the Yahoo servers gave birth to my shiny new account I finally got around to taking it for a test drive today.

I wanted to wait until I had something real to pop up there, and I completed my newest PPC site today. I must say, after some initial disorientation I was pleased with a lot of the changes. For me there are still a fair few points of frustration in terms of the usability that means they still just don’t compete with the Adwords interface.

These are only some brief impressions I jotted down whilst I set up a single adgroup within a new campaign. I’ll start with the negatives!

Yahoo Frustrations

1 ) Since they changed over to the new service, I can no longer see my UK ads when I log onto Search.Yahoo.co.uk out here in Australia. I e-mailed Yahoo support, and to their credit they actually answered within a few hours. With a response that, as usual, is absolutely no help whatsoever.

“Dear Mr. McCubbin,

In order to change this option, please click on the ‘Administration’
tab and then the ‘Edit’ button in the field ‘Account General
Information’.”

Apart from being mistaken for a man, the only way they know of for me to see how my ads are looking in the results is to activiate my ads within Australia. To be fair, that’s exactly the kind of response I’d expect from the Adwords support team… so they’re well up with Google on this one!

2 ) The new interface allows a maximum of 20 campaigns. Due to the way Yahoo have chosen to migrate the accounts (by allocating a campaign to each adgroup I had set up in the old Yahoo Search interface), I now have 83 campaigns. Most of these are dormant adgroups. So as soon as I tried to set up a new campaign I was hit with “sorry, no more than 20 campaigns”. To delete a single campaign requires you to visit 3 different screens. I’m in for a thrilling few hours

3 ) The migration process seems to have sorted my search terms within my old adgroups into several new adgroups. They are grouped by keyword type, and I can see the merit in this approach.. but to be honest, I’m just finding it confusing right now!

Welcome Yahoo Innovations

1 ) I’m liking the campaign setup process. The ability to target ads geographically is clearly presented and easy to use. They’ve even included a map for the bewildered and easily confused. Even Jade Goody could work out the geography of the UK with this addition.

2 ) Ahh… the new add keywords function. A breath of fresh air, making it easy to apply many keywords to a single ad.

3 ) The new Yahoo traffic forecasting tool is pretty neat. I love the little graph that shows you where the traffic starts to kick in depending on your bid amount. i.e. If you’re looking at spending 20p a click and that’s not getting you enough in the way it’s easy to see at which point other bidders start to get a reasonable volume of traffic.

4 ) The nice wee option that lets you preview other ads that are live for your search terms whilst you are writing your own ad copy. It’s great to be able to see how the competition are behaving in your targeted search space so you can seek to improve on their ads.

5 ) Dynamic titles! Hurahh!

Overall, I’m happy with the changes Yahoo has made. It’s a huge improvement on the old interface which has repeatedly resulted in my coming down with a bad case of computer rage (and has often led to me abandoning attempts to pop up listings.

There are still a few frustrations though Yahoo… so don’t rest on your laurels. Get the development team right back in there and continue the improvements!