Yahoo Gemini promises a solution for mobile search and native advertising for their “millions of people” that visit Yahoo daily to search for things, read the news and check email, etc. While there are some things we DO like about Yahoo Gemini, right now, the negatives are outweighing the positives.
As Yahoo Gemini increases in traffic as Bing transitions more traffic over to Yahoo, you might be considering using Gemini or increasing your ad spend there. Here is our review of Yahoo Gemini so far:
Cons of Yahoo Gemini
The Gemini platform is horrendous. The management UI (user interface) is beyond bad, it literally pushes into the realm of unusable, and we mean that literally… The user literally can’t make most campaign edits within the UI. Our biggest issue with the Gemini UI is the “management” and the “reporting” tabs are completely separate entities. What does this mean?…
To begin with, you can’t view data over a custom date range and make edits to the campaigns and keywords at the same time; the management (“campaigns” tab) is fixed on a 7 day window and contains NO conversion data. You also can’t export from the actual reporting tab, make changes to that report and re-import it into the UI to make the changes for you. It’s also incredibly difficult to make changes at all via the UI as the management tab doesn’t allow you to sort any columns (that’s right, no sort function). For example, if you have 150 keywords in an ad group, then you may have to manually tab through 15 pages to find the one keyword you want to edit. So, what are the other options? None really, at least right now if you want to actually report and make edits together.
So how do you manage your campaigns? Well, you have to export a report for the time frame you would like to review, but you can’t insert edits into this download and upload it back to the account (like previously mentioned). Instead you have to download the entire account/campaign as an upload template. Then you once again have to use a dual monitor setup (hopefully you have one) to review the data from your report and make the updates on the upload template. Then you have to add a column to the upload to note which items are edited, and upload everything back to Gemini. Have we lost you yet? Because most people are not patient enough to deal with that process.
Our other complaint about Gemini is the fact that scheduled reports can’t be timed and they are incredibly inconsistent. If you’re looking for automated reports to meet daily/weekly reporting obligations for clients, you can’t trust Gemini to fulfill those needs.
So, you may be wondering, why bother with Yahoo Gemini at all?
Pros of Yahoo Gemini:
Gemini traffic isn’t that bad! As Yahoo has migrated traffic over to their platform, we’re actually getting good results with our clients. We’re seeing relatively cheap clicks, a decent amount of impression and click volume, and we’re getting conversions cheaper than with Bing. Granted the volume is still significantly lower, but it’s been quickly climbing and becoming a more valuable search engine every day. This is probably the most frustrating part of this Yahoo Gemini situation; we’d actually like to use Gemini more, move more accounts over to it and spend more ad dollars… but the management is just so difficult to use that it’s just not worth it at this point.
If you’re advertising on Gemini and have any tips for the UI, we’d love to hear from you. Their support team hasn’t been able to streamline the process, though we’ve been told that the Yahoo Gemini product team is working on optimizations like streamlining the UI. And if you’d like to hire Full Circle SEM to deal with the headache that is Yahoo Gemini, give us a ring.
