Is Yahoo still sending poor quality traffic?

have conversions improved at all?

[danielanaidu]

I recently paused my yahoo ads because of very low quality, low converting traffic. Has anybody noticed any improvements lately? Or should I leave my campaigns paused? Thanks.

[JohnCanyon]

Absolutely hasnt changed, actually it has just gotten worse.

We have pulled 95% of our overture spending.

I have heard they are making some improvements, as always though no one over there knows anything... so it could simply be more talk and no action.

[Robino]

Overture/Yahoo! has definitely gotten worse!

You should see some of the sites that are sending traffic to us.

And then when I contact them they give me the same song and dance they always have.

We would like more specific information from you if possible. We are looking for which specific keywords are seen in relation to these websites, as well as a date range. You may simply forward us your weblogs as an attachment to this e-mail, if possible. We will then have more information for our Global Content Quality team to review the affiliates.

So I do...and of course nothing happens.

I've recently slowed our Over/Yahoo! spend by 50%.

What a joke!

[JohnCanyon]

Its a prime example of what happens when search engines start getting greedy.

Traffic increases, quality decreases.

[UnitedRigo]

Conversions have been getting worse for me. I have pulled 50% of my spend on Yahoo.

[wordy]

Robino

"You should see some of the sites that are sending traffic to us."

JohnCanyon

"Its a prime example of what happens when search engines start getting greedy."

Couldn't agree more!

Robino, are those sites heavily populating low-mid PPC Google Adwords campaigns resolving to YSM "directory sites"?

JohnCanyon, check out Altavista/Alltheweb natural SERPS. They are pure and could possibly compete with Google. Y! insists on polluting the Yahoo! SERPS with YSM directory sites to maximise revenue.

If you find a sucker and sell him something, why not sell it twice!

[ddogg]

Traffic as crappy as ever. Hopefully their new update will allow us to advertise to yahoo.com only or at least have some type of filtering capabilities.

[jeowind]

p*ss poor. Good news is that Yahoo seems to have shot themselves in the foot, at least with regards to our account. click throughs have fallen by 70%, so we didnt even have to pull most of our ads. Conversions have suffered a bit, but not enough to abandon alltogther

[Thorborg]

The 1st of may, my number of clicks increased 10 times but conversions to downloads from our website almost stayed the same. I has cost me 2000 $ and I am really pissed. What on earth are they doing? I reported it and got a "It is not our fault answer" I mailed them again, and they agreed to look at it.
Until then, I have stopped all advertising with Yahoo in the US.

Martin

[ccam96]

This drop in conversions started about the time they were losing MSN. MSN was where many of our conversions were really coming from but we didn't know this until we opened our Adcenter account.

[resham5]

I have also experienced something like this where I was initially running a campaign only on Adwords and after introducing traffic from Yahoo, my conversions have fallen.

[teenwolf]

Hopefully their new update will allow us to advertise to yahoo.com only

We can only hope. Something must be done to stop this downward spiral.

[bostonseo]

"Hopefully their new update will allow us to advertise to yahoo.com only" - that will never happen.

[teenwolf]

Agreed, it won't happen. But it should. Why don't they realize that it would actually result in MORE revenue long term. IMO, advertisers would begin bidding/spending more if they were certain of the source.

[bostonseo]

teenwolf you'd think they would be smart enough to realize that - but it's been almost a full year of advertisers (big advertisers) dramatically reducing their spend. So if they were going to allow you to just display ads on Yahoo.com I have to think it would have happened already.

It seems like they are content running this program like a 2nd tier CPC program now - being a cheaper alternative than Google and focusing in on smaller spending advertisers'.

[teenwolf]

It is unexplainable, isn't it? I've been asking for domain filtering for years and I know I'm not alone. But they're too worried about lower short-term revenue numbers to allow it to happen. You'd think they'd have better long-term vision.

My ad spend is down 50% already and I know I'm not alone there, either. That number will grow to 100% if things don't change.

[bostonseo]

My spend has been down 90% for the last 6 months.

[lethal0r]

i've just had a look through my log files for the last few days and im getting plenty of clicks from non yahoo / msn ads.

gasta shows up a few times, thats a bad one right? some other urls are 'water feed', 'site search', these are never gonna convert are they?

my ROI this month is down considerably, it better change soon or im just gonna do adwords only.

[Alternative Future]

We pulled out of Overture/Yahoo advertising & marketing and put the budget into adsense. Reasons: traffic terrible, conversation bad, management panel complicated, and customer service less said better...

[crak_bot]

Early this year I had good results with yahoo despite what everyone was saying. But then about a month ago conversion went to nearly zero so I had to cut all my spending.

I would love to advertise on just Yahoo since I'm nowhere in their organic listings for some reason but currently I just can't justify the spending.

Hope things change though.

[teenwolf]

My spend just changed to 0%. Adios goto. Er, I mean Overture. Er, I mean YSM.

[mallinger]

Has anybody noticed any improvements lately?

[webmasterworld.com...]

[rise2it]

I've gone from 3 grand a month to about a hundred bucks.

I long ago gave up on them actually 'getting it together'.

Not only their crap partners, but all the other sites they let 'bid' on terms - sites which have zero content, etc.

If their revenue decreases, they aren't going to try to figure out what the problem is - they are going to try to figure out a way to get MORE MONEY from those who still advertise there.

[davewray]

A year ago I would easily achieve an ROI on Overture that was 5 times better than Adwords. I advertised on Adwords because the volume was there and ROI was decent. NOW, a year later, ROI is similar, if not worse on Overture than Adwords. Quite perplexing. They surely must realize that if this keeps up they will not be making much from advertisers at all in the future...

Dave.

[Tropical Island]

One of their problems is that there are not a lot of choices left to them. Their major partners have left so they only have Yahoo + "The Others".

As the previous poster said they will only get more and more desperate to maintain revenues.

[Elric99]

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to post that I have found the same thing. Traffic and costs are the same, but conversions and profit have dwindled away.

[Murfman]

Just an example of how bad Yahoo's traffic is now... Remember 'mesothelioma'? At its highest point, it was at $165/click back in September 2004.

Today? $12.

[gregbo]

Just an example of how bad Yahoo's traffic is now... Remember 'mesothelioma'? At its highest point, it was at $165/click back in September 2004.
Today? $12.

Given how much click fraud is out there, especially targeting high-paying keywords, it doesn't surprise me that advertisers are paying less for 'mesothelioma' clicks now.