Google, Yahoo & MSN – 2007 Award

January 3rd, 2008 by Nick

2007 was a busy year for many of Pay Per Click agencies. Growth in number of clients and products has increased a demand for a physical work that had to be done on Yahoo, Google and MSN in order to upload new and upgrade old campaigns.

My question is how successful our leading search engines are in saving our time and making life of PPC account managers easier. In my personal opinion all three engines have made big steps, but the problem is that not all of these steps were forward.

Let’s start with MSN
We have all been anticipating this new and young player on the search stage. While reading their first manual I was thinking to myself- it’s going to be great. With all the experience that Microsoft has gained due to software development and the sheer amount of money and resources available to them, everybody’s expectations have gone wild.
I can’t describe my disappointment when I first came across it. They used Google principles but the implementation was much worse. Everything seemed to be in the place where you wouldn’t expect it to be, each change had to be done separately, you couldn’t upload campaigns as easy as on Google and the best option was to send a spreadsheet to the MSN support team. I must say they did try to improve it; unfortunately it’s just got worse.

OK, enough about bad things- let’s look at a positive side!!! And I must say, MSN has two. You can get very cheap conversions for your clients, even if it’s 20 a month on average and the support service is very good. So if you did succeed to get your ad up there you may just leave it running without worrying too much or without blowing your budget.

Yahoo
I was thinking how to put it right and only one thing came to my mind, Yahoo had a Botox!!! It went in ugly and came out bloated. And I’m still asking myself why?

We all know that the old Overture interface had many problems, but it had its plusses as well.
Panama, it seems to me, was an attempt to revive old Overture, by killing it completely and replacing it with something “not quite there yet”, “not quite working” & “not user friendly either”.

So why to spend so much money and time on developing something, delaying its introduction by a few months in order to get it right and still not to achieve its objectives?
Enough to say, that in our agency we call a Yahoo spreadsheet “A Death Sheet”!.

Google
I have to admit this is my favourite. Since the introduction of AdWords Editor it’s got even better, easy to use, LOGICAL & quick.

There are certain things that Google could work on, such as ad polices which sometimes give a completely irrelevant alert on Editor; a new analytics, where you have to be a professor; a new keyword research tool, which graphics are far from being perfect. Overall it’s very functional and in case you do have a question, the help tool is very clear and easy to use.

Conclusion:
As we all know two heads are better than one- the same can be said about the search.
We do need MSN & Yahoo and we do want them to be as successful as Google, but please, make our everyday users life easier. We don’t want just Google to rule the world as there is no benefit in it neither to advertiser nor to consumer.

But when MSN support team says that they use Google for search rather then MSN, it makes you think, how much trust should you give to anything else.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 3:14 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

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