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From the start everything looked good but we were being charged for far more clicks than we actually received. We tried turning down our firewall settings and the reason became obvious - we were being sent clicks from bad neighbourhoods that we had recognised, and blocked from our servers, ages ago. We contacted Y! by email to ask for these IP addresses to be blocked from our system; no reply. We spoke to people on the telephone helpline and it was obvious that English (we are a UK company) was their second language and we simply couldn't communicate with them. Eventually we were credited with the cost of the clicks a couple of weeks or so later along with a standard statement telling us that we had agreed to pay for ALL clicks and telling us that, no, we couldn't block bad neighbourhoods but by then we had a fresh lot of bad clicks that we had recognised immmediately as false and it was another two weeks before these were credited too. In the meanwhile we had to check every account every day and watch clicks being charged to us which we knew were false but which we could do nothing about except log ready for the next claim. We recognised that the workload to look after the whole pile of products that we intended to promote would be completely unaceptable so the whole project was binned.
What a waste for everyone. We want to do business. All we ask is that we be given the ability to block bad IP ranges that we KNOW are bad. There is a world of difference between the IP address of a recognised ISP and that of a murky proxy server; after ten years on the web we have a pretty good idea which is which. If we could pick up a telephone and speak to someone who speaks fluent English, who could stop this rubbish coming to us immediately instead of us having to send in a report every month complete with logfiles for every product we were advertising and then sit back and wait for 10 to 20 days for a reply and credit then we would be back like a shot and do some good business. Over to you, Y!
We spoke to people on the telephone helpline and it was obvious that English (we are a UK company) was their second language and we simply couldn't communicate with them.
What number were you calling? Yahoo! UK's support team is based in Ireland, with the UK account services & small business development being based in London. All the customer service reps I have dealt with over the years, have had English as a first language...
The first names of the people I have on file are Marcos, Lara, Sofia and Federico. I won't give their surnames but they certainly do not seem to have their roots in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales.
At the moment I am about to go argue my case against Yahoo! for putting a campaign live on my account that they uploaded without my consent! fun...
The way I see it is like shoplifting. In order to sell goods you have to accept that some undesirables will enter your store and lift goods. You can have security guards to catch them but the judge and jury will not penalise them and they keep coming back. You just have to put up with it.
"Blocked Domains" tool?
Where is this feature? I have countries blocked in Blocked Countries but can't find a blocked domains tool.
Yep. and although many of us know who these shoplifters are we have to keep letting them back into the store secure in the knowledge that they'll either steal our goods or damage them, and there's nothing we can do about it because the policeman round the corner just tells us to submit a claim which we'll get a reply to in ten days but, sorry, you'll have to keep on allowing them in. Except close the store and move on to something else, which my company's done. It's a crazy situation when we're dealing with a multi-billion dollar company.
Maybe I don't understand the problem completely, but can't you block the bad domains using the "Blocked Domains" tool?
