Yahoo Panama Results - What are you seeing?

Now we've had some time for our campaigns to settle, what are we seeing?

[rank]

I know this topic has been discussed in a few different forums, but thought it might be useful for us all to compare results so we can understand exactly what's going on. I've listed a few things we've seen since the launch of Panama

CPC Rates
We've seen these increase dramatically. We understand the quality score concept, and adhere to what it recommends (highly relevant landing pages, adtext etc) and infact have replicated our Google campaigns in Yahoo (where we can see our Google ads have high quality score).

We're seeing increases of up to 4 fold in our CPCs. We've spoken to yahoo about this, and they say that some people have witnessed massive decreases, whilst others have seen increases - however - all i hear is that most peoples seem to have gone up. What do you see?

Impressions
In some of our accounts, we see impression levels MUCH higher in Yahoo than we do in Google. We've separated our content match activity from the search activity, and we still see this in the search activity. Obviously.. we don't get more clicks from Yahoo than Google, which has implications on our...

Click Through Rates
We've got used to having much lower CTRs on Yahoo than we have on Google over the years, and hoped that Panama might help fix that. Whilst we've maneged to increase our CTR, it's still much lower than Google. How do yours compare?

Traffic Increases on certain terms
We've seen our overall spend increase since panama launched - which seems to be part a function of the higher CPC. However, further analysis also shows that almost 1/3 of our budget is now being spent on a single term (which was driving perhaps only 1/12 of our activity before). I've noticed a few people mention this in other forums - and was wondering if people here had noticed this

Click Fraud
On some days, we've seen huge increases in clicks, and spend has almost matched Google. We've raised this with Yahoo and have received refunds for the click fraud. However, we never noticed this as much as prior to the Panama launch - can't understand why the Panama platform would be more susceptible to click fraud than the old platform?

So that's what we're seeing. Conversion rates are about the same, but everything else seems to be going bonkers.

Let us know what you guys are seeing, so when we next speak to Yahoo directly we can take some better ammunition when they say "everyone else is seeing lower CPCs and Hiher CTRs and Conversion rates"!

Thanks

[superclown2]

I probably get more fraudulent clicks than genuine ones. The problems are that (1) I am charged for every click from any IP address even when it's multiple clicks from one address; and (2) there is no way I can block the IP addresses I know to be from bad neighbourhoods. I am seriously considering packing in altogether because of this, OK I get refunded eventually but it's all causing me a huge amount of work.

[toddb]

We are seeing pretty much the same thing. higher costs and clicks and seeing it on a few high cpc terms.

[superclown2]

I'll accept that conversion rate is pretty good at the moment - for genuine clicks. I just analysed the last five days of clicks though and three quarters of them are obvious phantoms. If Y could cut these out, answer emails promptly when these are reported or give us the tools to block them I could do a real lot of business - this is very frustrating.

[rank]

Thanks for the replies.. good to hear we're not alone in seeing this, but obviously not good that we're all seeing higher CPCS!

Has anyone out there seen lower CPCs since launch?

Also - we've recently requested a special report from our Yahoo contact which is like the Google "Search Query Report" which shows the actual keywords typed in by users which then trigger our Advanced Match keywords... on analysing the information - we've spotting something quite strange:

Imagine we're buying the keyword phrase "one two three" on advanced match.. whilst the vast majority of clicks we get on the phrase is exactly "one two three" we're also seeing some matches against keywords like "one four" and "two five" where only one of the terms in our phrase is actually being used. I know there was some talk a while back of Google starting to use Broad match in "reverse" so to speak - but I was unaware that Yahoo were also doing this. Has anyone else noticed this?

Still keen to hear from more people about their CPC rates so we can take the info to Yahoo...

Thanks in advance