Not to long ago, Yahoo Marketing Solutions updated their interface used. There were some minor changes made which I thought improved YMS. This being said, I was helping a friend the other day with some PPC campaigns he was running and suggested he use an ad which contained a question mark in it. He told me it wouldn’t allow him, and I passed it off as it probably being user error or something wrong with his browser possibly, who knows these days…
Now tonight I went through and was tweaking old campaigns and adding a bunch of new campaigns. Towards the end of my workload, I was trying to ad an ad which contained a question mark in not the title, but the body of the ad. Every time I would type in a question mark it would automatically be taken out of the text box immediately after it was typed. It has come to my attention now that Yahoo must have made changes to their system which now forbids users of using question marks in their ads.
NO QUESTION MARKS IN YOUR ADS?!?!
Are you kidding me???
It seems like these 1st tier engines are taking away every right that we as advertisers have! I understand some of the changes, and even encourage them usually. But some of the things, like not allowing question marks in an ad is ridiculous. I can think of many situations (ads) that could be made 100 times more effective by being able to use a question mark in the ad.
PPC is my favorite method of getting traffic and has been for quite some time. However, the way these big guys are treating some of us is getting to be just unfair. I am making an attempt to really broaden my knowledge on different tactics of traffic generation this year and hope that many others will choose to also consider this route.
Let me know what you think… Are these companies really pushing some of these things or is it just me?
I knw its awful.. bad!!
Yahoo’s censorship of advertiser’s use of “question marks” is another reason to prefer Adwords. Adwords is just a friendlier, easier to use, “do no evil” advertising partner. Imagine a newspaper coercing advertisers to stop using question marks in their ads. Incredible. Yahoo spends millions to bring advertisers back into the fold and then somebody in operations makes a decision like this that cancels out that effort. Amazing.