Content Match Turned on by Yahoo?

[James45]

I manage 6 different accounts on Yahoo/Overture and on 12/31/2005 it seems the content match was turned on while I was away on vacation since the 23rd. I didn't do it and nobody else has the paswords. In fact I loaded up the accounts before I left knowing I wouldn't go back in until the 1st.

Anybody else notice something like this? I find it hard to believe that 6 different accounts suddenly had the content match turned on mysteriously.

[Tropical Island]

You made me nervous so I quickly checked two of our accounts and content is still turned off.

Sounds very strange. It looks like someone accessed your accounts and changed them.

I would immediately change your passwords.

[Scott_F]

I noticed the same thing on one of my clients. Starting near the end of Decemeber they received an abnormal amount of clicks for a few keywords...really increased there spend. I called about it and they told me Content Search was on for just these keywords. Right away, they offered me 40% of the spend back, which I took, and then shut off content search.

[Umpyman]

I just noticed we blew through way more than expected in January, and when I checked why, I see a 3000% increase in Content Match costs from November/December to January. We had $20 in Content clicks November, $11 in December, and halfway through January we had $670. I surely didn't turn them on suddenly.

I put a Support Request in about it. I can't imagine someone sneaking into our account and turning on Content Match, but I can imagine Yahoo flicking a switch and getting more $$ from us. Is that possible? Anyone else run into this and gotten a good answere?

[Scott_F]

What they told me is that Content Search was always on. I am guessing because of the fairly new Publisher Network, people will start seeing a huge increase in the content search traffic they are recieving. I went through an shut off every client's content search option. It's the only way to make sure this type of thing doesn't happen again.

[abcie]

We had $20 in Content clicks November, $11 in December, and halfway through January we had $670.

Think thats bad?

Content Match Nov $23
Content Match Dec $978
Content Match Jan $4200 (FIRST 2 WEEKS!)

We got the same number of conversions (from Y! traffic) in the first 2 weeks of November as for the first 2 weeks in January, but at a 18,000% increase in cost!

As if that wasn't enough, Y! maxed out my credit card so my Google Adwords traffic got stopped as well.

Not a happy bunny!

[James45]

I got the same type of reply from Yahoo. It was always on... According to them, I went from a few hundred impressions per month to Over 140K in 3 days. Allegedly 600+ clicks were made on one account under the C/match.

So, I scoured my traffic logs and my IP tracker which registers every ip that clicks on my Yahoo ppc's and guess what, I can't find a spike in traffic. I'm feeling a bit scammed here. Check your log files.

[Umpyman]

Here's what I got back:

<snip>

So I had to go back to them with:

You don't feel this is an unusual situation? That only those two terms got hit so hard? I saw the same thing before contacting you - out of 1362 clicks in your report, 1277 of them (or OVER 93%) were on TWO TERMS out of 443 terms. That is WAY out of line with account averages and makes us think there was some type of click fraud going on.

In the same time frame, those two terms in Sponsored Match stayed right in line with the rest of the 600+ terms in our account. How could that be? This doesnąt make any sense ­ there is obviously something wrong here. No way two terms would suddenly account for 93% of clicks, and we jump from $10-$20 per month to $670 in half a month.

Then what did I get?

<snip>

So I told them they needed to get some type of maximum spend system in place or our Content Match will remain shut off. This is way too volatile for us to drop cash on. Crazy stuff...

Oh, and did I mention we had zero conversions?

[edited by: werty at 3:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed Email Excerpts - Please see TOS #9 [/edit]

[Umpyman]

Whoops, sorry about the TOS...in any case, they basically said the clicks are legitimate and might be because of an article on CNN.com, etc. although 93% of these clicks were on two terms...

[jam2005]

I just went through and turned all mine off. The spending has been through the roof on content match this month and the sales are not there.

I tried calling before about it also and got the "this is how it is supposed to work" speech. I spent $150 on an obscure keyword yesterday.

[netmeg]

I've turned Content Network off all my client accounts. Not only for the reasons listed above, but I've noticed several sites showing up heavily in my clients logfiles - all of which come from Yahoo's Content Network. The thing is, when I click the links they come in on, I see nothing about my client's ads. And when I look at the raw log files, it doesn't look to me like they're getting the whole page - or rather, they're getting the page itself, but none of the elements such as the images. It looked very suspicious to me, so I actually contacted one of the places that was sending this traffic, and sent him the log files, and he tried to tell me "that's just the way the web works". Umm. I don't think so, Lucy.

[jam2005]

I think that Yahoo has done something so that you cannot tell where the clicks are coming from. I use some very good tracking programs and it all just shows up as Overture.com in the reports. When I click on the referring URL, it brings up a page with a couple ads, but doesn't say what page the ads were on. At least with AdWords you can get an idea of where the clicks are coming from.

[netmeg]

I use my own tracking URLs and run my own WebTrends reports, and they show up in the logs as coming from the Content partners, not from Overture/Yahoo.