Is Yahoo crazy - you can't get traffic from just Yahoo.com?

[limitup]

So after becoming an "Expert" on AdWords I've decided it's time to focus on Yahoo. I setup a new campaign with sponsored match on, and content match off. Yet, only about 1/3 of my traffic is coming from Yahoo search - the other 2/3rds of my traffic is coming from crappy MFA-like sites.

I asked Yahoo about this, thinking I must have setup something wrong and all this traffic was coming from what they call their content network. But no, I find out that all these junk sites are part of sponsored search, and there's no way to get traffic just from Yahoo.com.

Are they out of their minds? I can't fathom how much money they are losing because most advertisers don't have the ability to track this stuff separately and probably just shut down their campaigns after all. I see that they let you block up to 250 sites, but unless I'm missing something they don't help you decide which 250 sites to block by providing any kind of tracking or anything.

Am I missing something here? This really bothers me ... this is a borderline scam if you ask me. Yahoo KNOWS that 95% of advertisers will LOSE money from this traffic.

[shorebreak]

Limitup - though your experience is not uncommon, I do think it's without question that Y!'s overall non-content search traffic converts for advertisers at a rate roughly commensurate with their current share of search marketing wallet. Having spent the last 4 years seeing ROI data for $100M+ in Y! spend for 80+ ROI-focused advertisers makes me personally certain of that.

That's not to defend Y!'s search network but Y! Search traffic is good enough to carry all the crap across the goal line IMO.

-Shorebreak

[Dragoshani]

Shorebreak - I'm new advertiser , how create good working ads with YSM?
Don't have any answers from YSM support 5 days. How to create new account with sowing up ads?

[limitup]

If you say so Shorebreak. Maybe I've just been unlucky. I'm running the same ad, same keywords, same landing page, same everything and conversions at my site are exactly half of that from Google traffic.

[Tropical Island]

Yahoo! Inc. to Layoff Hundreds
Battered by slow revenue growth and the popularity of social networking Web sites, Yahoo! Inc. is poised to lay off hundreds of workers, according to published reports.

[forbes.com...]

The chickens are coming home to roost.

It's easy to blame things like social networking but those of us here know the truth. They are basically an immoral & dishonest company and people are leaving the sinking ship.

[Insomniak]

Tropical Island, unfortunately giant public companies like Yahoo are immoral by nature, their responsibility is to return maximum profit to their shareholders and morality is rarely a factor beyond PR benefits. Im more inclined to believe the reasons sited in the article for Yahoo's problems. It's a no brainer that droves of Y's young audience are migrating to social networking sites.

[aeiouy]

Yeah I learned this too. If you have an ad that has a QS of 1 on Yahoo! it does not show up on the partner network at all, which means you get almost no traffic.

It is funny that they protect the partners from low quality ads but they don't protect the advertisers from low quality partner sites.

I think the reason they don't let you separate it beyond filtering by domain is people would find the traffic volume on Yahoo! to be minuscule compared to Google. Probably on par with what you see with MSN.

[webdevfv]

Sorry for bumping this thread but I've been toying with Yahoo! PPC for a while and this is a major reason for not getting involved.

On google I simply use their search engine and sometimes content partners, but never the adsense brigade who reduce ROI to miniscule levels.

If this cannot be done on Yahoo! it does seem embarrassingly amateur for a top player - either that or has been noted elsewhere, a sharp practice.

[Tropical Island]

Is it possible they don't want their VERY low impressions on Yahoo alone to be made public?