Microhoo and My 2 Cents

I thought I would make a new blog post. It has been a couple months, sorry to those of you that have commented awaiting a response. I will try to be more consistent about my posting times.

Well, this morning I was listening to 640 AM in the car, which out here in California is a talk radio station called KFI. I was very excited when I heard that Leo Laporte was the host. I had watched him all the time on TechTV when he was on shows like The Screensavers. In addition to the radio show, he is doing some other things with many of the folks from TechTV and new guys like Kevin Rose. His new screencasts can be seen/heard over at Twit.tv He also has appears in shows over at Revision3. I definitely recommend checking them out.

Anyways, Leo was talking about the recent Microsoft/Yahoo bid that I like to term Microhoo. Leo was making excellent points about how it doesn't seem like it makes sense to combine the companies and how it is in fact a bad idea. I have personal experience in the matter so I decided to call up and let him know from the "front lines" of the internet advertising world what we thought of the potential merger.

MSN and Reporting

As I told Leo, MSN is single handedly the WORST company I have ever dealt with. It's amazing to me that the largest tech company in the world is soooo far behind in the online space. I told a story about how I was on the phone with an MSN advertising rep because I needed a certain type of Keyword/Ad copy report on clicks and stuff. The type of report by the way, that all the other engines have by default. The rep's response to me over and over was and I quote, "Well, we're not Google." I DON'T CARE!!! Just let me know how much I am spending with you on particular creatives! This is only one of many stories I could tell about the horror that is MSN advertising.

Yahoo Search Sucks

Here is some proof in the pudding of how far behind Yahoo is from Google as far as search technology goes. I told Leo that Yahoo has a lot of bright minds working for them. For instance, I really respect Jeremy Zawodny who works at Yahoo and is nothing less than a MySQL guru. However, while I am sure their MySQL setup is simply amazing their search algorithms leave a lot to be desired.

We were bidding on a variety of loan keywords in Yahoo and paying a prince's ransom for them. Loans of any kind is an incredibly competitive market in pay per click and you have to duke it out with thousands of other advertisers to earn your keep. One of the terms we saw doing poorly was the term "lenders". Upon further review we found a variety of other words that Yahoo was listing us for with this word that were completely off topic. The most notable of the off topic words was "lender's bagels" I think anyone here can understand that buying bagel terms for north of $3 a click really isn't going to work out in the long run.

At first I thought it was our fault. Heck, maybe we put in the word as Advanced match and were supposed to get any related term. However, when I checked we were using Standard NOT Advanced match on the keyword. In Yahoo you can choose to use Standard or Advanced Match when choosing what keywords you would like traffic for. Google on the other hand has Broad, Phrase and Exact which is infinitely more clear. But let me take a moment and introduce you to the debacle that is Standard Match. Here is word for word what the Yahoo API documentation says about Standard match:

"Sponsored Search displays your ads to users who enter search queries related to your keywords. Sponsored Search has two match types:

* Standard - Displays ads for exact matches to your keywords, as well as for singular or plural variations, common misspellings, and topics that are relevant to your keywords, titles, and descriptions.
* Advanced - Displays ads for a broader range of searches relevant to your keywords, titles, descriptions, and web content."

Here is where my problem lies. Standard match apparently "Displays ads for EXACT matches to your keywords". Oh, except when we want to add singular plural variations, misspellings and topics relevant. You have to be kidding me! Do they not understand the definition of the word exact?! Last time I checked it meant there was NO variation. That exact was exactly what it was. :) Here is the dictionary.com definition:

"precise, as opposed to approximate" and "admitting of no deviation"

Guess what Yahoo? When I want to purchase an exact word there is a darn good reason why I want exactly that word. I don't even have to go into the psychological difference of someone searching for even a slight variation of a word, even plurals. We are having a wonderful time right now trying to purchase the word "window" but alas keep getting "windows". As you can imagine, most of the plural searches tend to be software related while the singular ones are more about the building materials. You should see how many "Negative Match Keywords" we have to use with Yahoo just to try to hone in on the words we want, it is crazy. In contrast, a Google Exact match is exactly that, just the word you want...go figure.

Yahoo and API Difficulties

Next up is Yahoo. I told Leo that Yahoo is the second WORST company I have ever dealt with. No one at that company is empowered to make decisions and it seems so disjointed it's a wonder to me that they are still in business. Here is a personal story to clue you in on what I am talking about.

Several months ago, we were spending a sizable amount of money every month with Yahoo. (It was in the 5 figures and is now in fact in the 6 figures) At that time were were using the API extensively. Side track: I founded a company about a year ago with 4 other guys and we have built our own technology that helps us find out what keyword with what landing page and what ad copy on what day at what time of the day is most effective. Basically like multivariate testing on crack. We then make decisions on keyword bidding and creatives using this data. Anyways, we were reaching our limit with the Yahoo API. We thought, no problem we can just call up customer service, explain the problem and then get the caps lifted...or so we thought.

After speaking with our rep we were told that we would have to speak with the API team about the problem and that she can't do anything about it. She let us know that someone from the team would contact us shortly because for some reason they can't be contacted. They can only contact us. A few days passed and we hadn't heard anything. A couple more calls to customer service let us know that a ticket was open and we should hear from someone soon. A few more days passed and still nothing.

One of our partners got the idea to start dialing for numbers at Yahoo. We knew that the local Yahoo numbers were all (454) 555-XXXX (That isn't the actual number but you get the idea). So he literally started randomly dialing numbers in that prefix. About ten calls into it we got a hold of a very nice man from some other division, I don't remember exactly which one). We told him about our problem with the API and he told us to hang on. He called the API team and once again said someone would contact us. However, this time it worked! In a couple of hours we had an email from a rep on the API team and were on the phone with them.

For those of you that don't know, Yahoo does their API a little bit differently than Google. With Google you get a certain amount for free and then anything above and beyond you pay a nominal fee. It makes sense because they don't want you endlessly banging away on their servers and the cost helps people make sure their code doesn't get stuck in endless loops. Because if it does, than you could end up paying a lot of money. Yahoo does it differently, they offer the API free of charge completely which is nice. However they restrict the quota so much that it is hard to do anything meaningful with it. If you have a valid reason to up the quota though, you can request a review and they will decide whether or not they will up your limits.

Next, they sent us a Microsoft Word document that is a couple pages long in which you need to detail all the reasons why you want more quota added to your account. A Word document?! If you are one of the largest internet companies in the world you would think you have enough developers to create a webform. Seriously, sending files back and forth through email doesn't give off the most polished image. Anyways, they "lost" the first file and so we had to send it again. 3 or 4 phone calls later our quota was finally lifted.

The whole time this was going on, our spend with them was stagnated. We couldn't grow because our API couldn't grow with us. This is a process that literally took weeks, when at the longest it should have taken hours.

In conclusion these are just a few of the examples of why I think these two companies would be a terrible combination. In fact, Leo said that if it went through it would be curtains for both of them. I couldn't agree more. While I have my differences with both, I do like the idea of other people jockeying for market share from Google. Competition is always better in my opinion. Albeit both Yahoo and MSN are tripping over their own shoelaces trying to catch up.