Yahoo's Extimation Clicks/$$ Lost me 100's of Dollars

Hi,

I recently set up a campaign and was suggested the following my YSM:

Estimated Monthly Forecast for $0.49 Bid
Average Position: 7.41
Impressions: 4,896
Clicks: 29
Average CPC ($): 0.42
Share of Clicks: 8%

Based on these statistics and a margin of error, I bid for one of my keywords and in just 2 days(dec 7,8,9) had the following statistics:

Impressions 3,021
Clicks 66
CTR (%) 2.18
Avg. CPC ($) 0.40
Cost ($) 26.23

Basically, YSM estimated that I would get 29 clicks for the whole month and I got 66 clicks in just 3 days!!

As you can see, the estimated and actual stats are completely out of range. This totally skewed my ROI and campaign.

Do the more experienced folks in here think that the clicks may be fraudulent (maybe by a competetor?) or am I reading something wrong and barking up the wrong tree?

Why I'm worried is because the conversion rate sucked. My offer usually converts around 6-8%, but in the last 2 days, I had a conversion of less than 1% !!

Thanks for your time. Please advise.

 

Give them a call. When I first started YSM they exceeded my daily budget by a few hundred $$$. I gave them a call and they credited my account.

 

if you did not disable the content network then such a thing can happen
I have noticed that the figures they give is always based on the search
figures they have no way of saying how many people would click your ad
from the content network
I would advise you to disable it

 

Remember people, these are all estimates. I doubt they are fraudulent clicks, but me too I experience problems with my estimates. Sometimes I'm supposed to get 50 milion clicks and get 2, or sometimes I'm supposed to get 2 and get 50 million. Remember to take them as estimates. Always set a campaign daily limit and tests will prove the real traffic out there.

 

I agree with the above. There are no fraud clicks. Estimates are exactly that... estimates. It will never reflect actual values and sometimes never even come close. Thats the reason for the maximum daily budget. If you're not setting this, you are screwing yourself. With that said, Yahoo also states something like they have the right to exceed your maximum daily limit by 30% or 35% or something like that due to the lag in real time updates. So for example, if you set your daily spending budget at $100, realistically it may or may not hit that $100 and can go as high as $130 or $135 (at least expect this much).

With all that said, if you plan on spending no more than $100 a day, set your daily limit at something like $75 and you won't go over. If you do, contact Yahoo and let them know what happened. At this point, they can't argue because it's more than the 35% margin.