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Anyone ever had any concerns about such things and the Yahoo/Overture PPC ads? Is there any validity to this concern?
I recently restarted my campaign after a long period of having it offline, and I have known for some time that Content is bad news, so had it switched off. The first few days we’re bliss – the conversion rate from click to application was excellent and traffic was arriving at just the rate I wanted.
About four days later… wham… the clicks keep coming but the conversions don’t. My daily budget is being eaten up in literally an hour (and it’s not that small of a budget).
I do a little digging. Low and behold, we are on the Content network. Not just that, but on the dodgiest looking directory sites I’ve ever seen. These are pages you know no one would ever look at because they are just filled with meaningless links in a list. Valid clicks from that junk? No way.
So my account has been switched off and I’ve sent a very strong complaint to Yahoo over this. I’ve had no response yet (sent it Friday), and to be honest I doubt I’ll get one. You thought Adwords customer services was bad – it looks like the Ritz compared to Yahoo.
Watch and track the referrers from Yahoo. In my area, about 80% of the traffic is from Yahoo's "partners". These partner sites are absolue junk and there is no way that they could legitimately be delivering more traffic than Yahoo.
I've had to turn off almost all of the big traffic keywords and go for all long-tail searches to try and avoid Yahoo's partner sites.
Still, I almost 3 times the conversion with Google that I do with Yahoo.
Yes! This has been another issue as a matter of fact! My ROI for contentmatch was like 6x higher than searchmatch and so I turned off contentmatch ... 2 weeks ago! Yesterday I found that I'm getting more clicks from a super shady spamware looking directory than from Yahoo! I asked Yahoo about it and how it could be if I content match is turned off. First they told me I was wrong so I showed them the logs, then I asked if they're a search partner and they said "no". So them I asked them point-blank if they'e a contentmatch partner and ... no response. ;-)
Boy o boy! I had no idea this is a systemic problem. I'm suprised no one has sued their ass yet!
If something doesn't change, I doubt I will continue with Yahoo for much longer. It's just not profitable now that MSN is gone.
That's the odd part. Yahoo told me they're not a search partner. But I have content search turned off. So either they're lying, or their system for turning off contentmatch is lying. Either way, it seems to me they've been caught in a lie. Its no wonder I haven't heard back from them, since I pointed this out. I guess it makes sense - when you see the site I'm talking about and the kind of traffic its supposedly generating, I guess I'd want to keep my relationship with them quiet too.
When a junk site can deliver 5-10X the amount of traffic that the Yahoo.com domain can every day, yet almost NONE of it converts, something is definitely up.
Anyway, it's a mess. And it looks like there's nothing Y! can do about it.
Nothing they can do? They could always revise their TOS and be strict about IP tracking of the ads served. I guess that would mean loosing a big chunk of their revnue though huh? ;-)
Thanks for the background info!
Yahoo has always been my favourite search engine (I always thought Google lent too much weight to blogs - and I hate blogs), but their commercial arm is absolutely terrible.
This seems to be another case of an internet company not understanding the concept of customer service. When you don't deal with people face to face, I guess they forget that those people still expect a high level of service.
As for me, still nothing back from them. I think that once again my Overture account is going to have to onto a long term pause. I'll give them another six months and try again.
I asked Yahoo where my ads are being shown and they insisted they're only shown in the US and Canada, but the timing has left me a little suspicious.
That is an absolute lie. I have content turned off and I am located in South America. My Yahoo ads are showing up on parked domains when I do a type-in.
Do NOT believe a word they tell you - they are inherently dishonest or so completely incompetent and ill trained that they themselves don't know where the ads are showing up.
...and by the way, if this is correct - that would mean that about 50% of the signups coming from my overture campaign were all scammers. Boy, the ROI sure looks different in *that* light!
There was a story that ran a while back (I don't have a link off hand) that reported that some of Yahoo!'s partners sub-contract with other partners, some of whom also sub-contract (usually to the shady guys).
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