Have you ever, like me, navigated through the ad copy in your Yahoo Search Marketing campaign and found random ad copy variations paused?

The first time this happened I called a member of Yahoo’s customer service team and asked them what could have caused this? They had no idea, and asked me to monitor it. I duely did so, and downloaded/uploaded bulk sheets of all of the campaigns, altering the component status of each ad groups’ ad copy to “ON”.

All went well for a couple of weeks, but then i started to see these “phantom pausings” of ad copy within each of our clients’ campaigns.

By this time we had been allocated a dedicated account manager who finally gave me the reason for this anoyance. In each ad groups’ settings we had “Optimise Ad Display” enabled. This means that Yahoo will predict which ad it feels will work best, and pause the others in the ad group – gee thanks Yahoo!

If you, like us, want to manually test the performance of ads and serve ad copy of different messenging, you will need to do the following:

In each campaign click:

This will open a bulk download of that specific campaign.

You will then need to go to Column C and alter the status of each ad from Off to On (assuming you want to resume all ads)

In order to keep this setting you will need to turn off the “Optimise Ad Display”. To do this go to Column AD, and change any status’ that are currently ON, to OFF.

You will then need to save the spreadsheet you have been working on as a unicode type(under “Save As Type”). Then name the spreadsheet whatever you wish, but ensure that you attach a “.csv” onto the end of it. Both the unicode and .csv components are necessary to import successfully to Yahoo.

You will then need to go to the Import option under the “Campaigns” tab.

Upload the file that you have just ammended and give it an Import Name. Note, that the Import Name is for your purposes and will have no effect on the upload being successful or failing.

Then UPLOAD.

If the upload fails, you have probably not saved the spreadsheet correctly. REMEMBER, Unicode & .csv.

I would be interested if this has bugged anyone else!!

Happy PPC-ing & have a great weekend!