Is there a way to exclude certain content partners?

[ByronM]

I get good general traffic over all but YSM has some terrible search partners that i would like to exclude - is that even possible?

[sem4u]

It is no possible at the moment but I hear that it is in the pipeline. Should have come in during the upgrade or even before that IMO!

One account I look after suffers terribly from bad partner traffic, so much so that I actively lower bids so that I am not in the top 5 for certain keywords.

Sure you can submit your logs and claim some money back for suspicious traffic, but this takes time...and as we all know time is money.

I would spend a lot more money with YSM if the quality of their partner traffic was a lot better...so come on YSM allow us to exclude partner sites...

[fordo23]

I agree with the Yahoo needing to provide the ability to exclude partner sites. I detected an increase of over 300% on one adgroup in one day. As I have a tracking codes on my adgroups I was able to use my site analytics tool to find the domains that were coming in on that Yahoo code. And bingo! A 'spammy' site part of the YSM search network was the cause of the increase, and of course there were no conversions from it. YSM have given me credits for this, so it's definitely worth the investigation, and it really took no more than 5 minutes. After that incident I'm regularly scanning my YSM tracking codes against referring domains in my site analytics tool.

[bears5122]

Will you be able to remove search partners or just content partners? I don't think they'd risk all the revenue they pull in from click fraud on their search partners to allow it. Even Adwords doesn't allow you to block specific search partners.

[fordo23]

I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure you if you set your Campaigns to "Google Search only" network you don't get their partner search sites. They come in under the "Google & Search Network" (which naturally they have as their default setting when setting up campaigns). I have all mine on "Google search only" and I can see from tracking I don't get any of those little spammy sites like Yahoo search network.

[superclown2]

I'm in the UK and I find that partner traffic converts well. Perhaps things are different in the USA? Anyhow we all bid against each other for clicks so if a traffic mix is not converting so well we will all end up bidding less. I'd rather have lots of poorly converting, but still profitable, traffic at a low cost than no traffic at all. There is only a finite number of clicks coming from the organic SERPs after all.

[superclown2]

"I don't think they'd risk all the revenue they pull in from click fraud on their search partners to allow it."

With the resources that the SEs have got click fraud on a large scale is easily detectable and leaves the perpetrator open to severe civil/criminal penalties. I shouldn't imagine it's easy to become a search partner so anyone who went to all that trouble and then got involved in an easily detectable fraud would have to be nuts. Let's face it, the biggest victims of click fraud are Y!, G and MSN, it potentially threatens their entire business model.

[alccweb]

Put 50 Euros into my ppc account in Yahoo France at 3:30pm Wed and at 4:30pm Wed I was notified that my account is down to zero. When I looked this morning I had 1,548,292 Impressions and 1168 clicks in my France Search Marketing account - all from the content network.
Seems very strange to me.

Google adwords recently provided a tool to see the URL's of the content partner that clicks through to your ad.

[alccweb]

"Even Adwords doesn't allow you to block specific search partners. "

You can block specific search partners on the Campaign level.

Go to " ¦ Edit campaign settings ¦" you should see an item
" Site Exclusion". You can exclude any site here.

adwords has a new report
"Placement Performance Help
View performance data for sites where your ad was placed."

which will identify the URL that the click originates from.

[PPC_Summit]

I believe site exclusion is only available for the content network or for site targeting. Per Google's help center:

Additional information about the site exclusion feature:

This feature is available only to advertisers who are opted in to the content network or using site targeting.
You can exclude websites at the domain (www.example.com, example.com), subdomain (topic.example.com), or path (www.example.com/stuff) level.
The content network is continually evolving and growing. As a result, we can't provide a list of all sites which are eligible to show your ads. By using this feature you can simply filter unwanted sites in case they are or become part of the content network.
You may edit your list of excluded sites at any time, and as often as you like.

You can also now block content partner sites with Yahoo up to a max of 250 sites.

With Google, you can also block their search partners and only get traffic from Google.com by selecting "Google Search" rather than "Google Search Network". Unfortunately this also blocks good partners like AOL.

I really wish the search engines would stop assuming that traffic from domain partners is as qualified as search traffic is. Really these sites should be part of the content network as for qualification purposes they provide the same type of traffic.

[alccweb]

where on Yahoo can one block content partner sites?

Also, how can one identify the content partner sites that are clicking through?

[superclown2]

alccweb: have you checked up on the IP addresses that those clicks came from? Any pattern? France joined my blocked lists over a year ago - far too many script kiddies playing games and too many unresponsive ISPs for my liking. Easy for me of course, I'm only after UK traffic.

[alccweb]

Thanks superclown2.

For now I've opted out of content partners in France. I'm waiting for YSM to get back to me with an explanation (Good luck, right?)