Below is a screen shot of the “Convert Campaign” page of Yahoo’s new platform.  Here you are supposed to upload or import campaign information and convert third party campaigns such as Google into Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns.  Well guess what… It’ s not that easy!  I have spent countless hours, and multiple emails trying to figure this thing out.  I just got off the phone with integration support, which by the way have been extremely helpful, but here are two problems that I have encountered.  Look below.

After over an hour, the Yahoo tech realized two things.  First of all when Google rolled out it’s Adwords Editor program, Yahoo was not too quick to update it’s import feature to accept a CSV file from this new editor.  They were use to the way you download reports from your actual Google account.  So after about 30 mintutes today, she finally realized she had to adjust “Some Settings” to accept my adwords editor download.

Next, and this is a biggy, my spreadsheet was chocked full of disallowed charaters such as the Ampersand (&), dash (-), Parentheses (), Number (#).  Well, she went through her entire list of possible error reasons when she realized this.  In fact, she is going to submit our case to support so that they can include this in the import instructions.

You might ask however, why in the world would you have these in the spreadsheet in the first place?  Two reasons:

First…If you create a campaign in Google and do not name it, they assign a default name such as “Campaign #1″.  Well before I came to work for this company, the individual who set up our campaigns set up random campaigns and them deleted them.  Here lies the problem, Google does not remove totally these deleted campaings, so when I downloaded the fresh raw data from the editor, it included all deleted campaigns with the # sign. 

Second…we have hundreds of part #’s and use the # in some of our camapign titles. 

Bottom line?  Before you try to upload a file from Google to convert to Yahoo’s new platform, make sure you remove any and all characters from the file, they will be rejected.  BUT, take note however, you DO NOT want to take these characters out of the keyword levels.  She said they do accept them there obviously because people use those characters in searches.

I am still waiting for the process to complete, but if it goes through, this will save me a ton of work.  Yahoo will help you convert Google campaigns to Yahoo campaigns only one time, so make sure you get it right!

See my recent post on Yahoo Panama import issues here.