Remember when Yahoo sent out notifications about updating their Yahoo Search Marketing terms of service, which basically gave them the right to "optimize" campaigns without consent or warning? There was a huge outcry for such activity, even though this was an issue back in June 2008. They even were bold enough to turn on the content network when the campaign manager specifically turned it off.
Just a couple hours ago, Yahoo wrote a blog post named The Truth about Account Optimizations. So, the title seems to imply that all the bloggers, including us, Andy Beal, Nathania Johnson and many many others are liars or very misinformed.
Yahoo said, although there was an outcry, they have seen great results. Here are those results, they said they improved:
- Since June 2008, we have optimized approximately 2% of all active accounts and created approximately 20,000 new ads.
- The acceptance rate of changes we have made is roughly 80%, which we believe indicates the changes have been helpful.
- The time needed to make optimization changes to accounts has been reduced from approximately ten days to one day.
Yahoo then goes through bullet points of the misconceptions we, bloggers, have been spewing about the program. Well, really - if you look at what they say, I don't think we, bloggers, are misinformed at all. You auto-opt in these advertisers, without notification that they are in this program. Then you tell us that you can "opt out," but they don't know they were in this program in the first place. You say you notify advertisers within 24 hours, but either the emails are caught by spam filters or most don't get these notifications. They said it is not designed for large advertisers who "actively manage their accounts," but yet - I know large advertisers who were hit by this, I guess "large" and "actively" are subjective terms. Yahoo said they would never switch on your content match if you turn it off, but we have reports that they did in fact do this (unconfirmed reports, to be fair).
I am not sure, I just think Yahoo could of handled this situation better. (1) They could have notified advertisers of a way to opt out of this, before it even was turned on. (2) They could have been quicker to respond to these issues. (3) They could have worked with us, the bloggers, as opposed to make us look like liars.
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.
