So, I guess that "daily budget" thing has no purpose?

Just launched my first YSM campaign to test the water. $9 a day budget.

I came home to find over 500 unique visitors (1 sale, great conversion Yahoo, thanks) and 3 charges to my credit card. I authorized ONE $30 charge to cover 3 days worth of advertising.

Who do they think they are to charge my credit card without permission? At least with Adwords, you know you will be getting charged. YSM makes you deposit first, which I thought was nice.

But most importantly, WHY did they ignore my $9 a day budget (should be maybe 40-50 unique visitors)?????

 

Yep.. they charged $219 for my $80/day campaign. when i called them they say they will refund if the monthly charge exceeds 15% of $2400 ($80x30).

SO i guess testing waters in yahoo is dumb thing to do ... they drive you insance traffic one day and they dont on the other

 

So YSM sets up there system to deceive its customers?

I'm pretty pissed. $100 is a lot, but thank god I didn't test the waters with $1000.

 

Oh, and just to BLAST YSM one more time, I had a 1:500 conversion for a product that converts 1:35 for me on Google.

 

OOps, and me who want to try Yahoo.

I am happy I found this post. I will think twice before going there.

 

Guys, this is easy to fix. When you start with Yahoo the billing default is set to auto-replentish your account (as you found out already). You can email them and ask them to set your account to prepaid mode. Then you put in a certain amount of money, and when its gone your ads stop until you add more more.

 

Yea -- a feature most people only find out about after Yahoo has a free-for-all on their credit card.

Even if this is true (I'm still trying to find it), YSM is set up to deceive customers by not making this option blatantly available.

 

Just contact them and complain and they will most likely give you
a refund. If you set it as $5 and they charge you $100 you
should complain.

But if they charged you $10 instead of $5 for the day, I don't
think there's much complaining to do.

 

I don't see why they would refund your money when they are delivering the exact service you signed up for. It's just another instance of what can happen when you skip over the TOS details.

 

IF you browse through several forums (including a recent member here), you'll see that several people complained and got a refund.

So they pretty much got free traffic for 0 extra cost. But usually
that happens when the levels get pretty extreme.

I also understand they have a TOS and all but getting charged $500 if you set
a $30 daily limit is pretty outrageous. What is the whole point of adding a
daily budget feature if they're going to do that.

I think they still are working on that or will fix it in the near future.

 

you people sure .. the auto-replenish thing can't be set by US?

and if it can't why is no one fighting to make them put the option, ask them if they would like another class action claim against them.

 

I advise people NOT to use Yahoo!

They're cheats!
First I set it to 60 pounds a day.
Second I was supposed to get 60 pounds as a bonus (but didn't get it).

Then when my account hit 50, they sent me an email saying "we took the liberty of charging you another 70.50 because your account was low"

What the hell!
I don't WANT them to charge me!

It also said to call them. So I did, but it's 4:30 am now!
So they charge me at a time when I CAN'T contact them!

DONT USE YAHOO

Their budget system is crap too!

It auto set each bid to 1 pound (2 dollars). I ended up with only 50 hits! (and NO sales for the business I was linking to)

Heres the email I sent them

Hello there,
I would like to start off by mentioning that I am extremely angry.

First of all I joined through a Link which said that I would get 60 pounds of advertising spending money which I haven't received.

I was then asked to deposit 60 pounds. Alright, fine, I did that.

Then a day later I'm charged 70.50 pence because my account was 'low'. I did NOT want to be charged 70.50 pence.
What's more, I was charged at 4:30am. Calling the number on the email shows me that Yahoo is closed! So why am I charged at a time which no normal person has the ability to contact Yahoo? I have 'stopped' the advertising so that Yahoo doesn't feel I am getting any unfair or free advertising.

Why is there NO option to stop 'AUTO' charges?

I'm a university student and I cannot afford this!
I simply wanted to try out Yahoo advertising thinking that I would get 120 pounds worth of advertising for the price of 120.

I also want to add that the account area is EXTREMELY hard to navigate around.

Why did the budgeting system not budget the money properly? I ended up with only around 40 hits to my site and being charged 50 pounds! I should add that NONE of these hits generated any money for me.

I therefor would like to request that the money which was taken from my account be refunded and would also like to know why I was not given the 60 pounds of 'bonus' credit as I was lead to believe.

K Saleh

 

so I guess I got lucky!!
I called them up and they had some questions like, did you stop the ads from running, when did you stop them etc..
Lucky for me I stopped them the MINUTE I got the email.
So they issued me a refund.

They said they're going to look into that 60 pounds credit thing.

 

another update.
So a woman calls me and tells me that 1) there is NO 60 pounds credit link.
and 2) although they said they'd refund me 63, the system shows them I have 53 now. I said wtf... but it said 63. She said, yes I know, I even took a screenshot, but our team leader said that it's 53 so we'll refund you 53.

Anyway, so that means I've lost 20 pounds for nothing. They've got 10 from vat and 10 from a glitch.

But as an apology they've given me 50 pounds credit. I wish I could just take that 50 pounds and put it in my pocket

Ah well. All I'm going to do is get my money back. Get the credit. Advertise and shut the account for good!

 

Amnesia, even if you had a bad experience with Yahoo. Don't
disregard them.

Start with adwords and get a profitable campaign with them.
Figure out a way to get good conversions and ads for keywords
with good bid prices.

Then copy and paste the campaign and run it (with modifications) on Yahoo.
This is the EASY way to make Yahoo profitable even though they
are faulty with the daily budget.

I wouldn't test on Yahoo EVER. Google Adwords is the best way
to start. Just get it profitable and don't ignore Yahoo because
they DO get alot of quality traffic that converts (sometimes
even better than Google).

 

I do use Adwords, my conversion rate is 1:30 and I get 300 hits through them.

With Yahoo I got 50 hits and the conversion through that was 0:50

I also did copy the same title and description. Yahoo only allows like 40 keywords and then they have to accept them, so they ended up accepting like 9.

I think I'll be sticking with Google for a while.

 

Best way to use yahoo is the prepaid mode. Although be careful if you let your account go down to zero - I came in one day to find out that Yahoo had sent me more clicks then my balance. When you have a negative balance, Yahoo wants a larger deposit to cover the difference.

The budgeting is hard to work with, becuase it will take your budget and look at the 30 day cost and if you run low, whack your credit card for that amount!

However, I would not let these factors deter people from working with Yahoo. I get some of my highest quality traffic from overture. MSN/Google I believe have much better interfaces for marketers, but at the end of the day the clicks with the money is what I am after!

 

That's nothing. About two years ago I opened up a new account with yahoo and somehow a glitch in their system set all of my keywords to the maximum amount instead of the amount I specified.

To my surprise, the next day I got a call from my credit card company asking if I was aware of the repeated $100 charges to my credit card??? Huh? What?!?

I logged in and checked my account and found what had happened. I was charged over $5000 dollars on a account that I set up with a budget of $100 per day!

After calling, explaining, escalating the problem up the ladder and threatening with a lawsuit they finally agreed to refund $3000 worth of the charges but I had to eat the rest of the balance.

They said that they weren't responsible for the charges that exceeded by daily balance because my bids weren't reasonable for that budget. I explained that the bids weren't what I set them at but they denied any errors on their part and felt that they were being more than reasonable with their offer to refund the $3000.

Sadly to say, I still use Yahoo because I do get good conversions from them but I am a lot more careful and monitor my accounts VERY closely.