Google has managed to integrate their Certified Professional program ( which I am enrolled in with their My Client Center, a nice interface that allows me to add in and remove any PPC accounts I happen to be managing at the time.  I can pop in and out of these accounts easily, and my login never times out.  When I want to create a new account a click and a little bit of information filled out gets it done.  I can add in the keywords, ads, CC info, etc. at my leisure.

Yahoo’s system is not nearly as smooth.  The Ambassador program (yes, I’m a Yahoo Ambassador too) is outsourced.  At one time there was a link set up in the Ambassador interface to set up a new account and be credited your commission.  Now that can’t be done without a phone call. During the phone call you need to request that the new account be “linked” with the main account you are managing.  The only problem is that once your accounts are linked, the link can’t be broken. This is a major oversight in my opinion.  If a client drops you, you can hand over their login information and have them take over management of the account, but you can still access their account from your main account.  What if things go sour for this former client’s PPC program?  They could easily point their finger back and accuse you of tampering with their account!  After all, you still have access, don’t you?  I admit this has yet to happen to me, but it’s only a matter of time.

Navigating through linked accounts can be a hassle.  You select the client account you want to look at in the Campaign tab of the navigation.  Now say you want to pull up some reports for this account.  Oops, once you click on the Report you’re back on the main account and you have to select the client account again.  Need to add some money to the account balance?  Uh oh, as soon as you click on the Administration tab instead of going to the client’s account admin, you’re brought to a list of the linked accounts.  You have to reselect the client’s account again to get to their admin page.  All of this seems very odd for a PPC GUI, when PPC editorial stresses that there should be as few clicks as possible from a user’s search to the product or information in question on your website.

I could go on, but I’m trying to break a habit of long blog posts and long gaps in between.  I’m still trying to get the flow down with this blogging thing.  Maybe you’ll hear from me sooner next time.

Yahoo’s automatic payment plan went a little overboard when a day’s worth of click charges went way over the daily limit by about $600. For those of you keeping score, since Yahoo’s automatic payment plan likes to keep at least three times the average spend for the account on hand, that means my client’s card got whacked for about $1800.

Now for the follow up - Yahoo has credited back the majority of the $1800. The amount remaining is the amount I requested stay put (hey, I still have to keep this thing running, right?) They also credited me back for the majority of the $600 in click charges that got this whole thing started in the first place. After doing a little more research using Clicktracks (a fantastic analysis package) I found the average time on site for this traffic was well below average (though still higher then I thought, probably due to one or two legitimate visitors bumping the average up). So I’m pretty sure it was clickfraud. Good thing Yahoo acted accordingly.

The problem now is that it’s happening again. This time to three other accounts recently transferred over from the old Local Sponsored Search program, albeit for much smaller amounts of money. Yahoo seems to be reacting again after a phone call this afternoon, but considering I was sure to set daily spending limits first, I wish Yahoo would just get it right before it was a problem.

Oh and a quick shout out (do bloggers shout out?) to my buddy Dan, who’ll be managing a non-profit PPC account for a friend of his. Not sure why he didn’t ask for my help seeing as how I’m the PPC guy. I know I’d sure as hell like $1000 a day to play with on a PPC account…

Imagine my suprise this afternoon when, within five minutes, I recieved no less than thirty eight emails from Yahoo saying it had wacked the credit card for $50. Alarmed I rang up Yahoo Search Marketing support and logged into the account. As the rep and I started talking I saw the balance stored in the account for click charges had swelled up to over $1900. The rep informed me that before I set the daily budget, yesterday over $600 in click charges had rang up in what she called a “sudden spike in activity” (read: click fraud, folks). You may or may not realize that Yahoo automatically charges your card until you have three times the amount of your average daily spend available for future click charges.

So that explained the repeated charges to the credit card. She broke down the spend for the day before for me as well:

Sponsored Search - $212.47/172 clicks/$1.23
Content Match - $415.93/215 clicks/$1.93

Wow. All in the less than five minutes it took me to turn off content match, and set the $5 daily budget. Word to the wise, set those things before you add funds to your accounts. The rep was actually very accommodating, and is putting things in motion to credit most of the charges back to the card. However, this isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with Yahoo and credit card charges. So keep your eye on your accounts; be careful with setting limits, and be extra careful with Yahoo content match.