This isn’t a finance blog. However, coincidentally, I happen to be going over Perceptus’ online advertising campaigns today and I’ve just had an insultingly annoying experience with Yahoo Search Marketing. So, here is my two cents on the advertising network that on which Microsoft is bidding (along with the rest of Yahoo!).
Edit: I decided to split the post in half. The rant about the poor user experience with YSM is here. The search click pricing is in the next post.
Why this post today? I forgot the YSM password. That’s correct, we care so little about our YSM campaign that I haven’t logged on in months and I can’t recall the password.
Anyway, no password? No problem, right? Not so!
I Googled for the right address to log in to my advertising account. I searched for Overture (an advertising middle-man company Yahoo bought a few years ago) .
That takes you here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/overture.php
Click login to go here: https://secure.overture.com/login.do?mkt=us&locale=en_US. Note how somehow a link has pushed me to a different domain, overture.com.
Try my username that I have on file. It’s not recognized. Try the request a new password option. Nope, it doesn’t recognize my username*.
It appears that there is no way to request a new password if you only know the email address that was used! You must enter both your username and email address to request a new password. Fortunately, I do have the username and email address, at least I thought I did.
At some point, I even managed to browse to a page that FireFox noticed that there was an expired SSL key error. Not reassuring from a $40B company.
This was getting frustrating.
So, I go back to Google to try again from square one. This time I’ll search for Yahoo Search Marketing. This time I get to here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/
On this page, my username and email are recognized. Though, I still had to request a new password, but that also worked fine.
The moral of this blog post is that if you are going to change your website, make it utterly clear to the stupidest person, like me, where the current normal login page can be found. Putting a relevant hint on the login failure message would be useful too if I’m trying to log into the wrong @!#$@#% website.
* as an aside, Google uses an email address for logins. People rarely forget their email address, even their old ones. We like that, so for all new sites we develop, starting with print-bingo.com, we only use email addresses for user account names.