Frustrating issues with Yahoo Search Marketing API

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Wed Feb 07, 2007 1:42 am

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Author	Message
msenin Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 14 View Blog	Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 8:24 pm    Post subject:     Today it was officially confirmed that {ovkey} will insert not the keyword from the account that we buy, but a stem keyword (a keyword in a canonical form). It does not really help us because we won't be able to match the canonical form of the keyword to the keywords we buy, hence won't be able analize their performance.
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msenin Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 14 View Blog	Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 6:43 am    Post subject:     Today spoke with Yahoo API technician and they have "never heard of anyone having problem with keyword insertion". It was a pretty shocking reply. Is anyone using {ovkey}? They say that majority of users do. Why didn't they notice the problem? I think very few users have as large a coverage of keywords as we do, so it's possible that they just get "false positive", i.e. the canonical form of the keyword matches the keyword they buy.
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msenin Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 14 View Blog	Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 3:20 pm    Post subject:     Yahoo had confirmed the behavior of {ovkey} today. They insert the Keyword.phraseSearchText, not canonicalSearchText instead of {ovkey}. They also said now they are planning to switch this insertion to use Keyword.text property, like I wanted. There's no ETA. Until then the developer has two choices: - use keyword-level custom URL and hardcode the keyword into URL to track its performance (which is what I did) - implement mapping between URL and keyword one is buying on Yahoo via phraseSearchText.
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msenin Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 14 View Blog	Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 6:22 pm    Post subject:     We turned on content match on one of the campaigns in Yahoo account. First little setback was that content match has to be enabled on account, campaign and ad group level. In Google API, content match needs to be enabled only campaign level. Maybe Yahoo thinks they give the API user more control by doing it, but so far it's just been a royal pain in the ass. But most important: unlike Google and MSN, where by enabling Content Match one begins to receive that type of traffic instantly, our account reps advised us that "on some systems it make take up to two weeks to begin to receive content traffic".
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msenin Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 14 View Blog	Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 1:00 am    Post subject:     Content match has been a disaster so far. It's been on for several weeks now, however we faced several problems: Yahoo uses keyword-level URL instead of adGroup URL when a client clicks on an ad. This is incorrect. I filed a bug report. Almost 3 weeks later Yahoo admitted the bug. They are going to fix it to comply with their own documentation. Until then we will not be able to track performance of content match campaigns, so for now we turned content match off. I also found another bug: {ovmtc} insertion does not work for content match. An empty string is inserted instead. They are still verifying this bug for 2nd week now.
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