Along comes the holiday season and PPC company practices tend to change at this time of year. This is the time when more people are making purchases online for the Holiday season, so PPC companies feel that they can squeeze that extra little bit of profit out of the advertisers by raising their PPC rates considerably. I know some of the popular ones like Pricegrabber does this exact thing, between the early part of November until after the first of the year, their rates increase considerably. This is very common among these type of sites, but I really didn’t expect it from a company like Yahoo. To my surprise I received an email from them today which you can read below, they are also stooping to this level. Don’t these sites understand that companies are barely breaking even during the normal rate times, and just about the time we can start seeing a little bit of profit from PPC advertising, the PPC companies turn around and raise their rates so significantly that any hope we had for a small profit has now gone out the window. I have sent Yahoo an email back telling them I will not be using them at all during the Holiday season, I refuse to pay more just to make the “fat cats” even richer while I suffer doing all the work. If more companies would get on board and turn off their PPC campaigns during this time, maybe these companies would open their eyes and stop robbing us blind. Sadly the consumer is the ones that suffer since we have to raise our product prices just to offset the costs of advertising.
Letter from Yahoo:
Important Notification: Product Submit Seasonal Rate Adjustments
Dear Product Submit advertiser,From November 3, 2008, until December 31, 2008, Yahoo! will be making a seasonal rate adjustment by increasing the cost per click (CPC) by 25% in all categories. This means that during this period your actual billed CPC will be 25% higher. This adjustment reflects the increased consumer buying activity during the holiday shopping season, which is typified by increased leads, better conversion to sale, and increased revenue for our merchant partners. The 25% adjustment to your billed CPC will be reflected on your Click Report and in your invoice.
Please Note: You will not need to make changes to your account before or after this period.
Terms & Conditions
Customer Care
if you have any questions.- The Yahoo Product Submit team
10/20/08
Microsoft Customer Service
Today I am going to share an experience I recently had with Microsoft and their product advertising team.
I have spent a lot of hours creating, uploading, editing, deleting and re-creating ads online for Mogiz.com and our Sellers.
Recently I decided it was time to give Microsoft Ad Center a try. If you have never heard of this program, it’s very similar to Google adwords, where you create ads and they are shown to users that search for your keyword on the Microsoft network.
I wasn’t very familiar with Microsoft’s Adcenter tools or their program, so I decided to see what contact options they had and to my surprise they listed a telephone number to call for help. I called the number expecting to be on hold forever and again I was surprised because I was only on hold for less than 2 minutes, ok too good to be true? This must be because I was going to be connected to an Agent named ”Karl from India” right? Amazingly I was connected to a very ambitious lady named Linda from right here in the US. Linda spent an hour and a half on the phone with me that day walking me through the entire program, explaining all the things I could and should do and the things to watch out for. She helped me create multiple ads, upload thousands of keywords and get my campaign active.
Now you may be asking yourself why am I telling you all this? Well because I don’t know if you have ever tried to get an answer from Google, or from Yahoo but I will tell you there is no phone numbers for these guys unless you spend thousands of dollars in advertising first and I still have a lot of unanswered emails I have sent to them.
Microsoft has take the time and expense to invest in that little thing that is so important to the MoGiZ name “Customer Service” I don’t understand why other companies don’t see how important this simple thing is. They forget who keeps them in business and how refreshing it is to be able to speak with someone and get your problem figured out so quickly.
My hat is off to Microsoft on this one and for this reason we will continue to advertise our products on the MSN network. “Thank you Linda”
