Mysterious Syndication Partners

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Mysterious Syndication Partners

Yahoo paid search traffic pouring in and not converting.

Brian Waldman

9:54 pm on Nov 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

As many others have expressed, I have seen a troubling drop in conversions on my Yahoo campaign. As such, I decided to dig a little deaper and reviewed my referring URL data.

Fortunately, I can track keywords by engine and referring URL, otherwise I never would have seen this, but my second highest paid traffic source is not Yahoo.com, as one might hope. It actually seems to be one syndication partner which serves Yahoo ads. Not content, but regular search ads.

Needless to say, the conversion rate on this traffic was pretty bad. In fact, it was .o8% on over 21,000 clicks over a 2 month period.

I would love to hear from anyone who has seen the same thing. My conversion rate on Yahoo.com is over 5%.

nixon60

11:45 pm on Nov 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

Yep, I've been chewing a hole in my lower lip over that the last few days. Impressions on one KW went from 21K to 330K to 1.1M in three weeks with no increase in conversions. Spending overall up about 75% in last week. I'm thinking about moving all my ad dollars over to AdWords. I've been pretty happy with my Yahoo traffic up until the last ten days or so.

Brian Waldman

1:45 pm on Nov 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

But do you see that the traffic increase is coming from one domain? To me, that is the real issue.

bumpaw

3:46 pm on Nov 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

What about using Overture with match type set to "standard" as opposed to the default "advanced"? I would like to find some research on the advantages of each.

NetPro

3:58 pm on Nov 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

Most of my concern recently has been the geo-targeting from Yahoo. I've had non-US/Canadian visitors straight from yahoo.com search.

However, I've gone through my stats and have found most of my traffic by far is coming from yahoo search and msn. However, I did find a lot from two other partners: <snip>.

What partner have you found in your stats?

[edited by: werty at 11:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics [/edit]

nixon60

7:09 pm on Nov 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

"But do you see that the traffic increase is coming from one domain"

No, not over the whole time I've been seeing the spike. Like NetPro I'm getting a lot of non-US/Canada traffic, but over the last several days I'm getting stampeded by traffic from <snip>.

[edited by: werty at 11:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 3, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics [/edit]