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I wanted to let you know about some great new audience targeting features that we just launched for our Sponsored Search and Content Match products.
Specifically, we’ve introduced:
- Ad scheduling, a dayparting tool that enables advertisers to schedule their ads for display at different times and days across an entire week.
- Bid adjustments, which allow advertisers to specify a premium bid amount for desired demographic groups and audiences.
- Enhanced ZIP Code-level geo-targeting, including greater control of how your ads are displayed.
- Upgrades to the management of Content Match, including the ability to choose what portion of your budget to allot to this product.
You can find out a lot more about these features on our blog [ysmblog.com] or in our Help Center [help.yahoo.com]. If you have any questions about these changes that aren’t answered in either of those places, please post them here and I’ll try to answer them.
Cheers,
YahooPete
[edited by: JoeT321 at 7:21 am (utc) on Mar. 17, 2009]
BTW the two biggest features your advertisers want are the ability to turn off shopping.yahoo.com ( which features search arbitrage) and the crappy landing page/domain parkers "partners".
- Ad scheduling, a dayparting tool that enables advertisers to schedule their ads for display at different times and days across an entire week.
I've noticed before that when I don't run ads 24/7, as in trying to do Ad Scheduling manually, it drops my quality scores.
We encourage you to think about how the new ad scheduling feature might be beneficial to your business, test out different strategies and closely monitor your results to ensure that they meet your business objectives.
@JoeT321 and eljefe3: Look for additional enhancements to be introduced later this year, which will provide advertisers with more control over their traffic, and greater transparency into the sources of their traffic. All I can say for now. ;-)
@aeiouy: That's a valid point, and you're not the first to make it. It will be considered for future releases.
Currently we are using "North American YSM" and should only be getting North American traffic, but if I look through our logs I can see that 29% of the traffic is coming from foreign countries.
I could see how maybe 2-3% could come from proxies or things like that, but this traffic is highly suspect.
This month we have had 2061 Yahoo! clicks being reported in our logs, with the breakdown of traffic being:
Country - Clicks - %
United States - 1156 - 56.14%
India - 200 - 9.71%
Canada - 186 - 9.03%
Mexico - 117 - 5.68%
Germany - 54 - 2.62%
Indonesia - 32 - 1.55%
Malaysia - 23 - 1.12%
Italy - 15 - 0.73%
Guatemala - 14 - 0.68%
Puerto Rico - 14 - 0.68%
Pakistan - 11 - 0.53%
United Kingdom - 11 - 0.53%
China - 10 - 0.49%
Korea, Republic of10 - 0.49%
Poland - 10 - 0.49%
Vietnam - 10 - 0.49%
Bangladesh - 8 - 0.39%
Greece - 8 - 0.39%
Dominican Republic7 - 0.34%
Serbia - 7 - 0.34%
Argentina - 6 - 0.29%
Switzerland - 6 - 0.29%
Thailand - 6 - 0.29%
Trinidad and Tobago6 - 0.29%
Australia - 5 - 0.24%
Chile - 5 - 0.24%
Kuwait - 5 - 0.24%
Nigeria - 5 - 0.24%
Satellite Provider5 - 0.24%
Spain - 5 - 0.24%
France - 4 - 0.19%
Jamaica - 4 - 0.19%
Lebanon - 4 - 0.19%
Philippines - 4 - 0.19%
Syrian Arab Republic4 - 0.19%
Turkey - 4 - 0.19%
Venezuela - 4 - 0.19%
Costa Rica - 3 - 0.15%
Hungary - 3 - 0.15%
Ireland - 3 - 0.15%
Morocco - 3 - 0.15%
Norway - 3 - 0.15%
Russian Federation3 - 0.15%
Sweden - 3 - 0.15%
Taiwan - 3 - 0.15%
Algeria - 2 - 0.10%
Algeria - 2 - 0.10%
Belgium - 2 - 0.10%
Brazil - 2 - 0.10%
Brunei Darussalam2 - 0.10%
Bulgaria - 2 - 0.10%
Colombia - 2 - 0.10%
El Salvador - 2 - 0.10%
Lithuania - 2 - 0.10%
Netherlands Antilles2 - 0.10%
Nicaragua - 2 - 0.10%
Portugal - 2 - 0.10%
South Africa - 2 - 0.10%
Ukraine - 2 - 0.10%
Aruba - 1 - 0.05%
Bahamas - 1 - 0.05%
Cameroon - 1 - 0.05%
Cayman Islands - 1 - 0.05%
Croatia - 1 - 0.05%
Egypt - 1 - 0.05%
Ethiopia - 1 - 0.05%
Ghana - 1 - 0.05%
Guyana - 1 - 0.05%
Haiti - 1 - 0.05%
Honduras - 1 - 0.05%
Iraq - 1 - 0.05%
Israel - 1 - 0.05%
Japan - 1 - 0.05%
Kenya - 1 - 0.05%
Monaco - 1 - 0.05%
Nepal - 1 - 0.05%
New Zealand - 1 - 0.05%
Panama - 1 - 0.05%
Romania - 1 - 0.05%
Singapore - 1 - 0.05%
Sri Lanka - 1 - 0.05%
Tanzania, United Republic of - 1 - 0.05%
Uganda - 1 - 0.05%
Of those 2061 that we received we were billed for 1894. This is roughly 8% of "bad traffic" that is being caught or screened by Yahoo!
There is another 21% that is not being caught, screened or refunded.
The scariest/funniest part of this is; Of the 2061 clicks, only 43 came from Yahoo! or ca.search.yahoo.com. That is 2.1% of traffic we received or 2.3% of traffic we paid for.
Follow these steps to turn on or modify Blocked Continents:
1. Click on the “Administration” tab.
2. Click on the “Account General Information” link
3. In the Blocked Continents field, select the checkbox for each continent to block. You cannot block your own continent, meaning the continent included in the market of your account.
4. Click “Save Changes”.
Hope this helps,
YahooPete
Is there a reason why the search partners can't be blocked or advertisers choose the search partners they want the ads to appear on?
[edited by: MrHard at 5:13 pm (utc) on April 14, 2009]
Is there a reason why the search partners can't be blocked or advertisers choose the search partners they want the ads to appear on?
Yes, there is a very good reason. Money. The only thing you can do is block up to 500 domains individually.
Despite parked sites looking spammy and like just plain crap, I've seen some good sales from them in the past.
Our lawyers make me say this next part:I didn't know you need a lawyer to post here...
I guess Yahoo knows they sell crappy traffic so they consult a lawyer before they say anything
The ability to block all "search" partners is really the tool that is most desired.Just do it!
In our industry sometimes when a client is near a state border we can't cross the border into another state so that's why we need the ability to exclude or remove certain zips.
:)
Sorry for the delay. On our accounts we current are blocking:
Blocked Continents **: Asia
Australia
Europe
Africa
South America
So that feature does not seem to work properly.
YahooPete, when will the zip targeting actually begin to work as advertised? In today's market DMA's don't work for our clients, they are very precise about where they want customers coming from. When and if it's ready why not give us the ability to use true radius instead of choices only 3 or 6 miles. Come on you guys are better than that and have the talent to make this a valueable tool. Thanks
Anyone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to PPC, will tell you that partner traffic outconverts yahoo traffic.
This applies to google as well.
We're not talking one niche either. This applies to virtually every vertical.
It's not brain surgery. The dumber the visitor, the better the conversions. That's why isp traffic is top notch.
"Anyone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to PPC, will tell you that partner traffic outconverts yahoo traffic."
another broad assumption...
let me make an assumption... if this traffic was so rich, they'd give us separate controls for it to maximize what they get for supplying it.
reality is, in some cases it may be great for someone, in others, not so much. as such, give us controls (as others have) so that we may optimize our results instead of ignominiously swallowing it all without segmentation abilities... in those cases where it's suboptimal for some, it hurts Y because those folks must turn everything down to minimize what they as garbage being forced down the gullet.
In what I put above, my one beef w/ Yahoo! is the foreign traffic.
First of all they do not have the option to buy purely US traffic. This is stupid... I do not sell to Canada or to Mexico, but those countries get lumped in to the traffic pool.
In addition to that roughly 30% of the traffic was from locations outside of North America. So I am getting screwed there.
If you look just at the partners, there are multi-hyphened-domains.info that send more traffic then yahoo.com. How can you say this is a quality partner?
Supposedly they are going to add more control to the accounts. If/when they do that, and it actually works, my spend will go up.
Almost always, I can narrow the garbage partner traffic down to 1 or 2 sites. I've had no problem getting Yahoo to stop sending traffic from any sites I specify.
We just track on a referring URL level and send them the losers, which are usually 1 or 2 sites.
... and are you serious about not being able to filter foreign traffic in Yahoo. These are options available in my account, and everyone elses I know of.
Exactly 99.5% of my traffic from yahoo is confirmed from the US by a GEO-IP script I run. I hope I misread what you wrote, or that perhaps you mis-typed it.
[edited by: NoLimits at 2:20 am (utc) on May 19, 2009]
Also for many of the referring "partner sites" that i have tried to block, I am not actually able to, due to the clicks coming from a second or third tier down.
1. yahoo > 2. first semi legit partner > 3. shady partner > 4. crappy crappy site.
The crappy site will encrypt the clicks and some how mask them... I do not think they are actually supposed to show up on that site. If we block the domain at 4. it does not show up, and if we block 3 it does not work, and we cannot figure out where 2 is to block it.
On some accounts they were able to block it for us, but we have not been able to get Yahoo! to do it for all accounts.
From my experience I am not too far out of line with the traffic I have been seeing. It seems like you are quite lucky in the niche/s you are in. In ours it is garbage, and quite hard to make profitable.
Regarding foreign traffic, I have those other countries disabled, but it does not matter.
Once you start receiving traffic from www2.DOMAIN.com, you cant block it unless you unblock www.Doman.com. This, most likely will bring back the flood of sewer traffic back from the unblocked domain.
Y's blocked domain section note:
--------------------
You can enter:
* A root domain (for example, example.com) to block your ads from an entire site
* Up to one sub-domain (for example, www.example.com or services.example.com) to block your ads from pages that are in that specific sub-domain
* Up to two directories (for example, www.example.com/news/money) to block your ads from pages that are in that directory structure
---------------------
Oh, and another thing:
That's what's written way down under in the administration section on Yahoo's UI:
"**Note: The accuracy of the blocked continents feature is not guaranteed and may vary depending on a number of factors."
Which is basically like saying "if you wish to block continents, YOU can TRY, but we guarantee nothing."
Cheers.
(Yahoo, get in an orderly line where it's easier to shoot you!)
What's funny, is that if you look at the disclaimer on the geo-targetting area, they don't actually promise to block any foreign countries.
I have very similiar numbers to yours and find that 99% of the foreign traffic comes from YSM's awesome partners. When i talked to my rep to discuss this, she stated that they cannot prohibit foreigners from using Yahoo Search, obviously.. she didn't know what she was talking about.
I cannot wait to see Yahoo catch up with google and move to whitelist vs. blacklist approach to who displays our ads. Over the years, YSM has been the worst experience of all our online marketing endeavors.
@JoeT321 - I couldn't have said it better myself. Absolutely no incentive for them to change their practice, as soon as they do (which will likely not be garaunteed) their profit margins are going to plummet. Unless of course, they have figured out a new way to inflate their CTRs.
