So YSM called me a couple of weeks ago and offered to suggest new keywords and ads for a client’s YSM account. I’m all for expanding keywords or doing whatever to increase search engine traffic to client’s sites (as long as it has a positive ROI, of course) so I didn’t have a problem with trying it out. The rep assured me that I could view the keywords and ads before they went live so there was nothing to worry about. I was all for them doing free work for me.

So last Friday I got a call and the rep asked me if I had looked at the keywords and ads and if I approved of them. They weren’t showing up in the account so the rep told me she would look into it and call me back. OK, no big deal.

Later that night I noticed that YSM charged the credit card on file to replenish the balance. Again, no big deal… or so I thought. Saturday morning at 2:12 AM I get another email from YSM saying they’ve charged the credit card again, just hours after the previous notification. I had noticed previously that sales weren’t up so I logged into our YSM account and sure enough, those keywords that I was supposed to approve of were live and had generated over a thousand clicks costing nearly a thousand dollars resulting in one conversion. Not cool Yahoo. “Broad” isn’t even the word I would use to describe the type of keywords they were bidding on… more like “irrelevant” and “high-volume.” Needless to say, I immediately paused the campaign.

So today I got a call from the same rep asking if I had a chance to look over the keywords. I related to her what happened and she wasn’t completely understanding. She started to confirm what it was that I had “requested” and she said she was going to look into it. Excuse me? What I requested? You called me and offered me this deal to me!

Stay tuned for an update. If a refund isn’t issued, they better be prepared for the consequences.