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

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 search.

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 a while of losing money.

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. Most of it is not even real search traffic. What a joke...

 

Interesting. That might explain why my campaigns are so expensive on Yahoo. What a joke YSM is.

 

Wow... this really makes me glad that Yahoo never accepted me as a publisher... what a load of crap.

 

It is really true that there is no traffic from Yahoo.com even we use the Yahoo publisher and their other services.

 

This is very interesting...I will look do my traffic analysis right away!

 

They put their adverts on parked domains which just seems silly.

 

well thats an interesting peace of information.... let me do my home work on this

 

No wonder it's costing me something like £3.90 per conversion where I've had it under £2.50 before now.

When will companies learn, that if you help the customer to be more successful, they will come back time and time again - screw them over and they won't. *shakes head*.

 

yup yahoo is a dumb search engine.........
i really dont like it as well as msn but the koolest search engine is google...

 

hmm I have just the opposite with yahoo, they convert very good for me and cheaper than google.

 

Well it should be pretty simple to filter them out. Just look through your logs via referrer for the sites which are sending you the traffic and block them, unless you have a very broad niche, within a few days of doing this you should see most of your traffic coming from yahoo.

I am still in two minds whether it is bad or good to get traffic from a parked domain, if someone types in bluewidgets.com and then clicks on your link where you sell blue widgets to me that seems pretty targeted. The problem comes that some parked domains have junk traffic targeted to them so the quality may be lower.

 

i wouldnt call them crazy, i call them plain ol' crooks. i launched a campaign and didn't select content network. over 90% of my traffic was from their search partners which is nothing but bots with 100% bounce rate. i blocked 250 domains in just 3 days and still they come. finaly i had to stop my campaign cause i was loosing money. CROOKS. same campaign which is profitable with adwords

 

@sultan
If it was a decent amount of cash I would call them up and ask for your money back, it sounds like click fraud just via a third party.

Yahoo should offer the ability to only allow certain sites rather than disallow sites.

 

I am surprised by the bad reactions people have had with Yahoo. My biggest problem has never been cost but the amount of traffic available. I would love to be able to get more traffic from Yahoo, but they seem to get relatively little compared to Google (no surprise there really).

Still, Yahoo has always been the best value for me. I guess it must just be the keywords I am targeting.

 

@beavershaw
if you have a look at what referrers are leading to conversions you may find that the direct yahoo ones where converting so well that even though the others were not converting well your roi is still positive.

From my tests, the ctr for non yahoo sites seems to be much higher but conversion are much lower, looking at some of the sites they come from the surfer does not have as many options they basically show a bunch of ppc links without a description, so they are much more likely to click on your link even though they are not as likely to be interested in your site.

 

This is why yahoo is dying.

 

I use Yahoo advertising and about 90% of my traffic comes from their parked domains Although, I'm fine with it, my conversion rates are above 20% and my free offers. I guess it depends on what you are advertising. But, yes I would much rather be on Yahoo's search results.

Thanks,
Mike

 

Yeah, I really really wish I could only place ads on search.yahoo.com, not their search partners. At least their search partners are usually users explicitly searching for your term, and in my case they are generally reputable domains like webmd.com. But straight Yahoo search certainly converts a lot better. . . I'd raise my bids a lot if I could only bid there.

 

I'm pretty sure that it's possible to block other domains with Yahoo! - keep track of the domains that you believe are sending worthless traffic, and block those domains. For some offers, parked domains convert better than search. For other offers, the opposite is true. Try to track it & see what your results are.

 

Hi,

I've been advertising with google and yahoo for a few years now.

I thought that I was getting only a few hits from non yahoo sites but I recently had a closer look at my stats and the majority of my clicks are from sites such as gogogo dot com. They aren't really search sites at all but have popular searches to click on down the side. I looked at Alexa and this site is quite high up, but I have no idea how or why people are getting to this seemingly useless site, and why I'm getting so many clicks from them.

I'm an affiliate so I can't check directly which sites and or keywords are giving me sales.

I may have thrown $20,000 down the toilet in the last year.

I've now blocked all the partner sites that show up in my stats. I sent an email to yahoo to ask them to look into it. Hopefully I'll get some of it refunded.