Yahoo! Search Marketing Worthless Clicks Question

This is kind of a long story, so bear with me. I work for an online retailer and part of my job is to manage our Yahoo! PPC campaigns. Recently, I noticed in Google Analytics that we were getting a ton of clicks from a site called allthefirevideo.info.

I took a look at the site and it's absolute garbage. After browsing around a bit, I was able to see where the clicks were coming from. Apparently, when you click the links, it displays sponsored search results as though you had actually searched for our keywords. Once I clicked a few (as much as I hated to help this moron earn any more money), I noticed that, as it redirected to our site (and other merchant sites), it flashed an Overture URL at the bottom bar on Firefox. For some ads, it showed both an Overture and AZoogle URL before eventually arriving at its final destination.

Now, in the last month or so since we've been receiving hits from this site, I've noticed our cost per conversion go from it's usual $2-10 range (depends on the season), all the way up to $35 with no conversions. The bounce rate on hits from that site is much, much higher than the usual bounce rate for that campaign. Obviously, I am not happy about this.

As I looked around a little more, I noticed a ton of similar sites sending clicks our way. Most were sending just 1-2 a day, so unless I viewed the Google Analytics referring sites by just 1 day at a time, they didn't show up - which is why they went undetected until one of them started sending 20-30+/day.

I called Yahoo! yesterday morning to get to the bottom of this, and they told me something very disturbing - Apparently, even though our account had disabled Content Match, we have been getting content clicks on some ad groups. The rep figured that the problem had happened sometime after the Yahoo! upgrade. Since all of our ad groups and campaigns were magically enabled for content match after the switch, I was going through and shutting off every ad group, and it was taking forever. I called Yahoo! to ask if there was a faster way, and they said that I could just disable it for the account and that would cover everything. I did that, and shut it off at the campaign level, just to be safe.

I guess that didn't work, because the Yahoo! rep said that we have been getting content match clicks for some time, since not all ad groups were disabled. He suspected that was why the crappy allthefirevideo.info site was serving our ads, and said he would run some kind of report to find out just how much the content ads have cost, and arrange an account credit.

What worries me, though, is that the junky pages that are sending us clicks look like they might actually be serving search results instead of content match (There is no content on the page - none!). What's more, the Yahoo! guy said that he shut off all the content stuff for our account - for real this time - and these random sites are still showing up in our analytics for today.

Does anyone have any experience with a similar situation? Are these sites (banquetserver.com is another one serving Yahoo! ads) actually considered "search results"? I know that Google partners with some similarly questionable sites, but they make it very easy to opt out of their search partners. If that's what these sites are, does Yahoo! offer a way to protect yourself from this? This is really frustrating, and I appreciate any input.

 

Just an update - After speaking with their tech support, we found that the ads in question were actually displayed as search results, and that every click was costing the same amount of money as if someone actually searched the keywords at Yahoo.com.

They also said that, unlike with Google, there is no way to separate actual Yahoo! searches from "searches" with their search partners, so we have no way to prevent those unethical sites from racking up hundreds more clicks - short of shutting down the campaigns.

So that's exactly what we're doing.

 

It looks like you answered your own question. Actually, we did have issues with the content network staying on Yahoo! based on what your first assumption. Disabling at the campaign level did not work. Each adgroup had to have it disabled as well. It looks like this guy, had the same problem as you. My guess is, Yahoo!'s new quality pricing, similar to Google Smart Pricing, is a reaction to complaints.

Since their is a new report in Google AdWords showing Content Network transparency I am seeing a lot of arbitrage site referrals. Oddly, some of these sites are actually rendering some good CTRs. There are not enough clicks to warrant excluding them, because they are helping the overall all CTR. Plus the report does not reveal all of them. Thanks to Google's new report we did find many impressions from ads were being wasted on Myspace, Digg, and Ebaumsworld -- all of which were not our target demo and were not being clicked. This was good to know. So we used the Site Exclusion Tool and nixed them.

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I would suggest contacting the owner of the site directly (Whois info), explain the situation, and ask him/her to kindly exclude your URL through his Yahoo! Publisher's Network account. Another option, Yahoo!'s newly acquired graphic ads partner might be of service, if your products display well. Since you are marketing a retail site and Yahoo! is a huge consumer-based engine, it seems a little drastic to throw the baby out with the bath water.

 

It happened to my video campaign as well. Based on my web statistics, many clicks are came from Yahoo Search Partner sites. It is impossible to contact them 1 by 1 and I don't think they will exclude your url. So the only thing I can do is stop the campaign.

 

the best way is getting away from yahoo ,i try search marketing of them ,the ads price is higher than adword . and i have the same problems

 

wwwbug - What's unfortunate is that we have had extremely good luck with Yahoo! campaigns in the past. In my experiences with consumer products, I've always gotten better results on Yahoo! than Google (I didn't have the same results with information/services, though).

seostew - Thanks for the advice on contacting them. I looked up their registration information and I'll see if I have any luck with that. Considering that I'm basically telling them that their site is worthless to us (no matter how nicely I phrase it), I don't have extremely high hopes about getting them to exclude us, but it's worth a try - that campaign did very well before this.

 

They really should refund your money. That is click fraud. My last few campaigns with yahoo have been virtually worthless. Sounds like yours are too. Too many sites being approved to display yahoo ads. That site is obviously cheating.

 

They ended up doing an investigation and granting a refund for a bunch of clicks. I'm happy with the way it was handled after YahooPete got in touch - things were resolved not long afterwards.

Unfortunately, until they let us choose not to display our ads on these spammy "search partners", this will be an ongoing problem. Just today I discovered another one I hadn't seen: http://trainingrestaurant.com . I guess I'll just have to keep track of these sites and get in touch about it every once in a while until they give us the ability to prevent the problem from happening in the first place. I've seen the effects of eliminating search partners in Google (hugely positive, in my experience), and they actually have a few decent ones (like AOL, if memory serves).

The lesson? Watch your analytics and don't be afraid to speak up if something doesn't seem right.