Are the quality of Yahoo's clicks falling?

Hi there,

I started work for a UK online sports retailer in July-07 and since Apr-07 the company's new sales from Yahoo PPC traffic has fallen month-on-month. Nov-07 new sales was 42% down on Apr-07 and 43% down on Nov-06. In comparison with all other PPCs (Google, MSN etc) new sales are all up month-on-month.

In Aug-06 our new sales dropped by similar (40%) amounts for 3 months after MSN split from the Yahoo PPC Network, but returned to the same level as before.

From Aug-07, my Yahoo account was switched over from Overture to Panama. Since then I haven't changed the Yahoo account a great deal, other than to improve the ad text etc. I have checked that the tracking is working and that we are still getting the same clicks from the same keywords are before Apr-07.

So it leads me to question the quality of the traffic from Yahoo PPC.

I have sent an email to Yahoo asking someone to help me workout what is happening. I am really puzzled why this is happening. But unless I get an answer, I am going to have to cut back on the clicks/costs to achieve a pre-Apr-07 ROI level.

Any ideas on what could be happening?

Regards

Dean

 

As of October 1st, 2007, Yahoo lost one of its biggest search distribution partners in Europe, Orange (France Telecom). By some accounts Orange made up 40-60% of total Yahoo Europe search traffic, so that's a biiiiiig loss.

Here's the news.

 

Yeah, my sales in Europe suffered. =[