Yahoo: Inactive Bid Bomb

[Discovery]

Sorry it's looks like a pile on Yahoo day.

In the past 10 days we have watched a great deal of our top performing keywords on Yahoo go inactive due to minimum bid requirements.

Why let bids go inactive at all? What does it hurt to just let them hang around at the 16th position until the marketplace shifts back and puts them on the top 10 again?

How in the world are they coming up with the minimum bid?

I can't help to see this as a money grab to support a falling valuation.

Discovery

[Walker610]

I had a Yahoo bomb of my own recently. Yahoo gave me a notice that I had keywords that were below their new "minimum bids." After reviewing the keywords, I saw that they were all relevant to their ads and landing pages, so I accepted the minimum bid increases. Later on, I realized that I was bidding $1.50 for a very relevant keyword that I used to bid around $0.25 for. What?! Why the huge increase, especially when that same keyword in my Google account has a quality score rating of OK and a much lower minimum bid for first page results?

[Discovery]

This is our experience as well Walker (and welcome to SEW!).

We have over 7 years of pricing data on these keywords and certainly the trend has slowly seen Avg PPC costs increase with competition over time, however Yahoo's new minimum bid is far and above that of Google and MSN. What we have as an average bid on Google is $3.48 for an avg position of 3.6 and on Yahoo they want $15.61 just to turn the work back on? WTF?

So thats a long way to say, I agree with you.

I'm so very dissappointed to see Yahoo! take a dive like this.


Discovery