Importing

[Shmuel]

Why why why is importing a bulk feed such a pain in the arse? Anyone else as frustrated by this process as I am? There are way to many useless fields requiered in my opinion.

[smomashup]

I agree with you. My luck with that feature has been about 50/50 which isn't very good IMHO. Most of the time I think it's faster just to get a few people to hammer it out manually or, if time is not a concern, try the upload once or twice and if you can't get it... file a ticket and have them do it for you. It's not quick but it works.

Surprisingly, the new MSN import feature is very stripped back, but worked for us on a rather large campaign the first time out of the box. Hmmm.

[beu]

Originally Posted by Shmuel

Why why why is importing a bulk feed such a pain in the arse? Anyone else as frustrated by this process as I am? There are way to many useless fields requiered in my opinion.

Just so you know, importing a bulk feed product list into Google Base is a pain too!

[Shmuel]

Originally Posted by beu

Just so you know, importing a bulk feed product list into Google Base is a pain too!

Yes it is, but still a heck of a lot easier than YSM.

[PPC]

The old Yahoo! upload tool was so easy to use too. Its funny you post this thread because just yesterday I tried to use the import tool for the first time in months. Due to very low volume in Yahoo, I figured I would try advanced match with negatives. So first I go to the campaign and try to add negatives to the campaign. For some reason Yahoo! allows negatives at the account, ad group and keyword level but not the campaign level. So I go to the individual ad groups and cut and paste the negative/excluded keywords in the appropriate box (which is way too small by the way). I do this at least 5 times but the system will not save it. So I figure why not try the bulk upload feature... I spend almost 2 hours first trying to upload an old template, then downloading the new one, then formatting properly, then uploading it only to get the following message on every term (1000 terms in about 10 different ad groups):

"1). Unable to determine which ad group is the parent. Please check the ad group ID and ad group name."

The ad group names were fine so it must be the ad group ID. Why would Yahoo! require that I put the ad group ID into this template? Isn't the idea of a template to make things easier? Certainly this template is not making anything easier for me. I have many campaigns and many ad groups and I don't have time to go searching all over the place for each ad group ID.

So at this point I just quit. I had already wasted enough time and chances are, even if I did spend more time tracking down ad group IDs, that I would just run into more problems with this. So instead of using advanced match with excluded terms, I will just be using standard matching. Honestly, this process would have taken less than 2 minutes at Google. I could have easily just pasted negative keywords into the 'add negative keywords to campaign' tool and been done with it. Instead Yahoo! has me jumping through hoops for half the day.

Yahoo! Panama started out with a lot of potential, but as with any product/system when first launched, it also had a lot of bugs that need fixing and improvements that need to be made. In fact, since Yahoo went live with Panama, Google has probably added 30-40 changes (some minor, some major) to AdWords while Yahoo (who really needed to) has done virtually nothing.

[smomashup]

*confirmed*