Lilly

I was wondering if anyone else besides myself has had a lose-lose experience with Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture)?

Six months ago, out of curiosity, I went to the trouble of creating an advertising account and setting up different keyword campaigns. After a few days of running our ads ... and a few cycles of our bank account being auto-recharged when my account (according to them) 'was low', I disabled all campaigns offline. The next day, when I was able to FINALLY view the stats, I noticed that my funds were not low at all and that I had even more money from them recharging me, then I had began with!

Completely disgusted with this "adventure" and very shortly thereafter--using their in-house "Support Center" I requested that my account be canceled--and the funds remaining to be refunded. I have requested this of them twice a month for 3 months now. I NEVER received one reply from them. Not a peep! Completely ignored.

What they did instead, (I discovered after logging in a week ago to use up the rest of my funds since I was obviously not getting a refund), is disable my account as I DID request --which now has more money than it's original investment-- so that I can no longer turn my account ON "online'. However, they still have all of our money. I’ve placed calls, left voice mails-all with NO reply. I SHOULD have known better.

Any other experiences or suggestions would be greatly appreciated at this point.


Thanks!

Lilly

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compuXP

This is definitely interesting. Have you tried posting this on DigitalPoint? It would get a little more attention there (I guarantee it) - I've never bought anything from Yahoo! and similar stories have convinced me to never use YPN.

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Lilly

Yes, in fact I did. Nothing so far. Thanks so much for the suggestion though and for the comment--it validates my utter disgust.

Ironically, even though we were put in the Yahoo! Directory some years ago by an unknown editor for a relationship page, I was contemplating vying for the paid inclusion to Yahoos Business Directory, maybe next year. Now ...

NOT!

For obvious reasons ...

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Matthew

Hmmm... Interesting...

I was at the Salesboost 06 in Utrecht (the Netherlands) last month. I liked it that they sponsored the convention and gave us a nice solid notepad to write things on. They even left a leaflet behind, telling that if we e-mail a certain address, that we'll get 50 Euros of advertising money for free.

Sounded great!

So, back home, I immediately sent an e-mail.... Nothing...
Not very neat to say the least, but OK... I also don't like to give things for free.

What I don't understand though, is why the hell they're taking so long with updating their search engine results!!! That's the least that they can do!

There was a time that Yahoo! was THE best search engine you could find: go to Yahoo if you want to look for something. Google was still very small back then. If you ask me now, Yahoo lost its glory.

Sorry for changing subject, but I also wanted to express my disappointment.

Matthew

Hmm, they are working on something though...

The e-mail engine has been renewed and it looks like they're doing nice things with the search engine too!

They're working hard to be ahead of competition again, they even force their employees to stay home between Christmas and NYE... For financial reasons we think...

So, who knows, maybe Yahoo! will be able to push us into the next generation of Internet computing...

My new site is starting to get indexed there slowly too, which is an extra bonus

nabu-studio

I like Yahoo!

Our website was nowhere a few month ago and it just appeared on page 2 for the main keyword!

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maxdoor

Absolutely, my experience with Yahoo/Overture was very bad. Deceptive, expensive, and non-productive. Click-fraud seems to be near 100%. Google Adwords seems to be honest, productive, and they seem to control click-fraud pretty well.

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unakuwana

For over a year we were spending around the same each month on Google as Yahoo, during a six month period we performed a survey from our payment landing page to see where our customers were coming from, and were surprised to see that Yahoo hardly ever got a look in. So we reduced our monthly budget during the next month to virtually nothing, and surprise surprise our sales did not reduce, and nor did our traffic. We concluded that there could only be one explanation, so we closed our account (but not before telling Yahoo exactly why).

Dont be fooled by Google either, they are not immune. We removed our adverts from Googles content network and only advertise on Google itself. Guess what . . only a very insignificant drop in sales & traffic.

http://www.beartoday.com

Matthew

As for a follow-up to my Salesboost post: they FINALLY gave me the 50 Euro credit! So, the coming days I'll start testdriving it. Wonder if it'll be any good...

It seems that the people beta-testing YPN are getting rather rich with it...