My boss would like all of our pay-per-click ads to show around the second-place position. So as I write this, I’m in the middle of tweaking bids for thousands of keywords on Yahoo! Search Marketing, using their bid forecasting tool to find the right bid to keep us around second place.

The problem is, it doesn’t make any sense.

For example, we’re bidding on the term “medical equipment supplier“. Last month, our average cost-per-click for this term was $1.51, and we were coming in right between second and third place (2.5). According to the bid forecasting tool, if I want to move our ad up closer to second place, I should bid … 76 cents.

Yeah, that’s right. According to Yahoo!, cutting my bid in half should raise my ad’s position.

I just sent a message to Customer Support to see if they can explain this, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve sent dozens and dozens of support requests to Yahoo! over the past three and a half years, and they’re almost always a huge waste of my time. Usually they don’t even answer the question I asked. There’s either a major lack of reading comprehension skills in Customer Support, or they’re trained to deliberately ignore the real problem.

In the meantime, I’m appealing to you to help me figure this out. Is YSM’s bid forecasting tool useless, or am I missing something here?

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