Yahoo sent out an email last week to its partners announcing some changes to the way it will be mapping keywords from July 29th. In the past Yahoo has mapped certain keywords to others within its paid search listings much in the same way as Google broad match works. As a former pay per click campaign manager this often caused me head aches as their mapping, which was supposedly done to improve the quality of their search results, seemed to penalise the professionals willing to spend the time building high quality keyword lists. Funnily enough, it also had the affect of reducing the keywords available in their market by mapping low cost keywords to higher cost ones, hence making them more money. Strange that isn’t it.
The other issue with their system was that they just weren’t very good at accurately mapping keywords together. One specific example I vividly remember is when they decided to map all the listings from the keyword “home loan” to the keyword “mortgage”On the face of it these may sound like pretty similar words, but in the finance market a home loan is another way of describing a loan secured against you existing property, not a mortgage to buy a property. What this meant for advertisers (I was working on secured loans campaigns at the time) was that overnight, you started to receive a large amount of costly, irrelevant clicks and aso ended up displayed irrelevant ad text. There was no warning with these changes and at the time went they were gong through this mapping process it was a case of keeping a very close eye on keyword level spending to understand when a change may have been made.
It seems that no Yahoo has seen the error of its ways and is unmapping an initial list of 772 keywords, although they havent disclosed how many this leaves still mapped. This is good news for professional PPC managers as it makes the job more complex which brings more need for their services. It is easy for an advertiser to manage a keyword list of maybe 100 keywords but if this keyword list becomes 1000 or even 10000, with targeted ad text needed for all, it becomes a lot harder.
A fill list of the keywords to be unmapped can be found here