expertSEM

This morning while reading this article, I noticed a lot of similarity to an experience I’ve had with one of my own clients in February. We started managing their account, and since they had not yet upgraded to Yahoo!’s new Panama system, we created a new account from scratch, and turned off their old Yahoo! accounts… or so we thought. After about two weeks, our client complained about the high bills he was getting from Yahoo! Looking into the account, we discovered that the old account was still online! Luckily, I had an email correspondence with our Yahoo! reps in which we discuss the account transition, and the fact that we turned the accounts off, and if they could please confirm.

Nevertheless, we called Yahoo!, made them look at the account, and had them make sure the old account was offline. Problem solved, right? WRONG. About 5 days later, our client calls me again asking why he got another $1,600 charge on his card for the old account. I called Yahoo! again, made them look at the account, and sure enough, the account was still online!

What I should also mention, the reason I had Yahoo! look at the old account is because during the transition to the new one, the old stuff vanished from the old interface, meaning, we could neither see that account, or get any stats on it, for all intents and purposes, it had been annihilated. Yet Yahoo! still had some sort of access to it, I won’t pretend to have any idea why, or of what was going on, I can only provide my observations on this peculiar matter, and very clearly, we had no control via the interface.

When all was said and done, Yahoo! had over-billed our client by a little over $5,000. We told him to reverse the charges on his card until they can give us an accounting, but we still have not heard any straight answers from Yahoo! as to what went on, or more importantly, how much they are going to refund.

This does not bode well for advertisers. A few thousand dollars may not be much to Yahoo! but it certainly gets the attention of our clients. And this was certainly not the first incident we’ve had to research and resolve without Yahoo!’s help.

In January, one of my other clients was billed $1,400 for … Drum roll please… GOOGLE ADBOT TRAFFIC! When I looked at our server logs, one IP caused all the extra spend, and a simple reverse IP lookup revealed Google’s well known and easily identifiable adbot. Of the many criticisms for this Yahoo! error, two stand out:

1. Why would they charge us for thousands of clicks from the same IP when it is clearly either fraud or a bot?
2. Why can’t Yahoo! identify THE MOST COMMON BOT ON THE INTERNET and remove the traffic automatically without me having to investigate it myself?

Working with all the big search engines on a daily basis, it is obvious who leads this industry and why. I never have billing problems with Google, nothing is hidden, and their support staff is proactive, not reactive. Yahoo! (MSN too, but I have too much criticism for this post) while still lucrative to use, is eroding their value to advertisers by being untrustworthy and unreliable on a variety of fronts.

For all of you advertisers out there, I would highly recommend keeping detailed notes for all you do with Yahoo!, and furthermore, check your server logs for the bot activity, I have no confidence that Yahoo! will take this out automatically anymore.