Yahoo Dropped Keyword Minimum Bids

Yahoo Search Marketing decided to drop Sponsored Search minimum CPC across many keywords. The affected keywords happened to be keywords that were previously put on inactive status (automatically based YSM’s Quality Index) – That was how Yahoo penalized low quality ads and keywords. The YSM email that was sent out to advertisers insisted the change is to help out YSM advertisers in the recent economic climate:

Dear Advertiser,

In this economic climate, we understand that you need to stretch your marketing budget as far as possible. So we thought you’d want to know about some changes that we hope will help lower your costs and increase your clicks.

Given that certain business categories have been impacted by the current economic conditions, we’ve reviewed minimum bid amounts on a large number of Sponsored Search keywords and reduced the minimum bids on many terms. This review process is a part of our ongoing efforts to optimize our search marketplace.

Some of these changes to minimum bids have already taken place. Please log in and review your account, as you may find that a number of your keyword bids that used to be below the minimum requirement may now be active if their minimum bids have been lowered. These keywords will automatically reactivate (and start displaying your ads), so make sure that your spending limits allow for additional traffic.

We appreciate your business and encourage you to continue to invest in Yahoo! advertising.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

This time, the reduction of minimum CPCs across many inactive keywords has nothing to do with the quality of ads or keywords (aka YSM’s Quality Index). Therefore, this change does nothing good to improve Yahoo’s ad quality and is moving quite the opposite direction of what Google Adwords has been doing to improve Quality Score of keywords and ads.

Because of this change, you may have many low quality ads and keywords re-appearing on Yahoo. To control your budgets and the quality of clicks you will be receiving, you should immediately review your previously inactivated keywords that have been re-activated by Yahoo.

Previously, PPC Hero also received tons of alerts from Yahoo about the roll-out of this massive change all at once.

How other blogs talked about Yahoo Search Marketing’s keyword minimum bid decrease: