Search Engine Tigers

The simple answer is that for Google you get a maximum of 25 campaigns per account, for post-Panama release Yahoo you get 20 campaigns per account.

Now what if you want to go over that amount? Well, for Google you can go do a live request for help, and provided you explain your need to the satisfaction of the CSR on the other end, you’ll get it bumped up to 100. In my experience I’ve only had problems with it being denied by one rep, she refused to up our maximum, instead telling us how we should restructure the accounts (in a way that wouldn’t meet our business need). The solution there was to wait for a few hours and try again, on the third attempt we finally hit another CSR, who had no problem with bumping our maximum allowable category count up.

Yahoo is a different matter. I contacted them to find out their policy on bumping the max campaign number up, and received this cryptic response.

Currently as this time we show that you are a new level account holder, and the maximum amount of campaigns allows for a new level account is 20. Unfortunately this is not something that can be changed or edited.

After asking for clarification, this was the response

In order to receive more than 20 campaigns in a single account you must be a Platinum advertiser. Platinum advertisers spend 120,000 annually on their advertising with us

So for Yahoo, they only really want to look after the big spenders, and nickel and dime the little guys (those $5 account start-up fees must really add up). Despite this, Panama is still a big improvement, as at least you have the ability to manage 20 different campaigns in a single account, unlike the previous version of the software where you could only manage a single campaign in a single account. Still, this is one area that they are not leapfrogging Google in…