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Im interested to hear from any Yahoo Partners here and their experience of Yahoo in terms of payment for clicks generated from their site and their over all experience of partnering with this company.
One of our sites is signed as a Yahoo publisher site and displays the PPC adverts as required in line with Yahoos strict publishing guidelines.
My first impressions are that despite Yahoo being a major company the tracking reporting details they provide a partner with are amazingly basic and are not in real time, you only know what you are doing today a couple of days later!. Also end of month reporting is slow and is also just as basic. (a poor designed XML spreadsheet that isnt even aligned to the size of an A4print out paper) - i dont know why but i just felt that i should be expecting something far more superior that i get!
The other thing i notice is that if say unique user 1 clicks on a yahoo advert then visits the sponsors site and then leaves and decides to click on another sponsored advert, the same window will reopen but change to the new sponsor. My conclusion of this is that Yahoo possibly? pay me as a partner for the one unique visitor click but charge the two sponsors as they inturn both have a new unique visitor?.
Likewise if the user visits my site again and clicks on another advert again i do wonder if that click counts - do they pay me on it?
Another thing i dont like about Yahoo is that if the user on my site is looking for "blue-widgets" and Yahoo dont have any inventory for that term, i display no adverts.
In an ideal world i would program my asp to deliver "Widgets" sponsored adverts if no exact "Blue Widgets" sponsored adverts were found as the user would likey be interested in general "widgets" in any event and the sponsors for the general term would benefit from the visitor. However, under Yahoos T&Cs this would count as two calls on a page and Yahoo only permit one call only as i understand. This is a big issue and again i do wonder if this one call business is so that they gain from click throughs they can charge the sponsor for but not pass onto the publisher.
Finally, since moving to Yahoo for this site amazingly the click through rate is significantly lower than with previous partners (down 50%) yet the adverts are positioned and displayed exactly the same. I can only conclude that either:-
a) the reporting of the specific clicks by Yahoo favours Yahoo in some way over what they report to me?.
b) They dont credit partners with 100% of the clicks they say they are doing?
C) The buyers of Yahoo PPC adverts are displaying adverts that are simply just not as effective as they should be?
To sum up, I now feel that the move to Yahoo Publisher Network was possibly a bad one. Sure the click costs are much, much higher for most of the keywords involved however, the click through rate is so much lower that im not any better off and im having to put up with worse service and sub-standard reporting along with now concerns (some outlined above)over if im being credited correctly.
Any experience or feedback on any of these issues would be very much appreciated
Kind Regards
Richard
I suspect they are discounting quite a few clicks as coming from other than the USA or surfers do not trust Yahoo as well as Google.
I also do not like the pending clicks and available clicks reporting they do. Once earned there should be no "pending". Anyway, moved the whole site back to adsense and saw an immediate uptick in income for that site although the clicks paid less. Go figure.
If they will ever come out of their cocoon they may become a beautiful butterfly but as it is.....
Ann
Some of our sites do better with AdSense and some better with YPN. Really depends on the topic. CTR with YPN is much less, but the clicks often pay more. Took a lot of experimenting to figure out on which sites YPN works best.
I concur with the information above.
I've gone back to YPN, and I'm counting my blessings for being in the beta. I can't wait until it goes retail.
I would get booted for having too many foreign clicks. :)
I don't feel it is the publishers responsibility to screen visitors and show only to USA traffic. Won't hap'n cap'n. That is what YPN should be doing.
So hurry up YPN, we are both losing money here.
Ann
Any chance that when YPN gets out of beta, earnings will drop?
Any chance? I'd say it's a certainty.
[edited by: Tomseys at 1:42 pm (utc) on Aug. 25, 2006]
