YSM Short Descriptions Required in May 2007

[YahooPete]

Hi there,
Heads up here! Two important changes coming soon:
Starting in May 2007 we will require short descriptions for ALL new or modified ads in our new advertising system.
Starting in June 2007 Yahoo! Search will only show short descriptions or up to 70 characters of the long description. Accordingly, we highly recommend that you include a short description in your ad if you have not done so already. Long descriptions will continue to be shown on some of our external distribution partner web sites. Our goal is to help improve the overall search experience. We have found that shorter descriptions have been a best practice in the past.

What’s changing?

• Titles will continue to be 40 characters or less.
• Short descriptions are now required when creating or modifying an ad; short descriptions must be 70 characters or less.
• Display URLs must be 35 characters or less.

We’ve posted some helpful tips on short descriptions at the following links:

Think Short post at Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog (http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2007/04/05/think-short/)

Short Descriptions Overview (http://help.yahoo.com/help/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/start/overview_shortdesc.html)

If a short description is not provided by the end of June 2007, we will automatically cut-off your ad on Yahoo! Search, which may impact your ad quality and potentially your ranking. So get started now by adding short descriptions to your existing ads to guarantee that your most important information is included.

As usual, if you have any comments feel free to post here. We are listening and welcome your feedback. You could also send me a private note.

All the best,
YahooPete

[ExposureTim]

Thanks YahooPete,

It seems to me this should have just been made a requirement of the Panama upgrade. People were more tuned in to having to make changes at that time...
and incremental change requests aren't very welcome.

Esp. since the shorter ad text was really advisable as of a year ago, this notification seems way past due.

It doesn't affect me, I've already got my biz in compliance, so I'm just saying...

[shilly]

Pete,

I want to make sure I understand this correctly?

If someone has a current ad with no short description and the first 70 characters of the long description is fine, do they need still need to add a short description or can they leave it with just the long description?

Thank you

[deilenberger]

I'm hoping I have time with the Yahoo reps at SES this week to tell them exactly how big a PITA it is to modify about 300 ads on Yahoo.

Their non-intuitive web interface, which as far as I can figure out - requires about 4 steps to actually modify each ad - has some bugs in it. Even when I very carefully keep my short description to 70 characters (as shown by their tool counting off the characters) - when I go to save it - the tool tells me I can't because my description is too long. Removing one or two characters doesn't seem to do it - it requires me to remove 4-5 or a word or two.

It would also be immensely helpful if there was some way to KNOW which ads I've modified to conform to this standard. Right now - I'm renaming each ad group as I modify the ads to indicates that I've been there done that - but that adds yet 2 more steps to the process. There is no way to see what ads were modified on what date, which might give me a clue that I've gotten to that one. Right now - I'm forced to go through the alphabet, it took all of Monday to get through "A" - hopefully since "B" is shorter it won't take me all day.

Nice going Yahoo - it's things like this that add to Google's success, and gives Microsoft hope they can be a player.

[swesthafer]

For the most part, a majority of my ads are short and will work fine with the 70 character limit.

Unfortunately some of my older campaigns that are more than a year old don't meet this qualification.

I'd like to suggest some ideas that'll make the migration easier for users:
-Dashboard flagging of ads that will be affected at least 30 days prior to system change. Right now there's no easy search or quick navigation through the system to view ads.
-Search and Replace tool. I myself have over 20 client campaigns that I manage. It'd be nice if I could spend just 2 minutes doing a search/replace on a campaign to update ad copy to make my campaigns compliant with the new services rather than spending 30 minutes per campaign thumbing through ads one at a time.
-Offline campaign management tool. I know this is a pipe dream, but it'd be nice. I noticed the availability of the API today on Yahoo's blog so I'm hoping that'll be of some help.

Google's navigation/UI seriously trumps Yahoo for allowing efficient management of large scale campaigns.

[PPC]

You might try downloading your entire accounts to csv/excel. Then sort by component type to find all the ads, then sort the ads by ad description (short). This will group all of the ads with no short description together. From here you should be able to easily edit the ads right from that worksheet (possibly cut and paste ad descriptions from other ad groups). Then just resumbit the changes via bulksheet upload.

[swesthafer]

That is if bulk upload worked for me. It spits out quite a number of errors whenever I try to revise a whole campaign.

Also- there's compatibility problems with Excel on Macs and the different character formatting, and I happen to be on a Mac for the majority of the day.