Yahoo/Google PPC Feature Sharing

I need to rant about the features of Yahoo versus Google. Who has what and what they need to share.

First off, I am setting up Yahoo with all of my company’s accounts. We spend lots with Google every month and are wanting to do the same (maybe not AS much) with Yahoo. So I start with my first question, how do I get all of these keywords and data from Google to Yahoo? When I first started in search marketing, it was all by hand. And if you were a BIG Yahoo client, they let you load a spreadsheet. Man, that was a good day for the agency I was working for at the time.

Alas, things have gotten easier … sort of. Using Google AdWords Editor, you can export your campaigns from Google (Good Job Google!). But you can’t just throw that into Yahoo. They use different inputs. So I started looking into redoing the info to be Yahoo! friendly. And guess what?? They have a converter! I was excited! I would have this seemingly 40 hour project done in an hour. I downloaded all my campaigns and loaded those into the converter.

It “converted successfully” and said to load the new sheets into the import engine. I did so … and got an error. The header in the sheet they gave me was wrong.

Wait … didn’t Yahoo give me that sheet? Weren’t they supposed to convert it for me? I looked at the sheet they gave me, and the template they provide on the import engine. Sure enough, the headers are different. Annoying Yahoo Thing #1

I figured out what to do to get it to import a few hours later and have been working on it since then. But this is what irritates me, why can’t this be easier? You two use the same ad size, etc. But really, why make it this hard to do this? I won’t mention what else I saw in the “converted” sheet I got from Yahoo! but the ads weren’t right.

So then I got to thinking about something else. Yahoo has this nice converter, and Google might, but I don’t know about it right now. I recently asked my Google AdWords team (they are GREAT) about Manager Defined Spend and getting restricted logins. They set me up with BETAs. They listened and gave me what I wanted with the logins, but it was stuff I had already seen in Yahoo. There are things that Yahoo does better.

Logging into accounts into Google vs Yahoo. In Google I can assign people to accounts, and they only need one login. Right now in Google, if I want to give someone reports access on 2 accounts, they need 2 different logins. Hmmm … Annoying Google Thing #1

But something Google does better is payment. Yahoo only allows CC and PayPal. Well I love invoicing. My Accounting department loves invoicing. Less CC bills. But that’s not an option in Yahoo right now. Annoying Yahoo Thing #2

So I guess the point is that I have been doing this for a while. And it has gotten easier, but it could be so much easier if the industry leaders would set some standards. Share you two and help us all. And if you can’t share … steal. You use each other’s systems. Steal away, you already do.