YSM says I own $67k for 34 million clicks!!

Sorry to be so sensational. I checked my search marketing account yesterday, drilled down into one of my campaigns shown on the dashboard, then looked closer at one of the ads in the campaign to see the impressions and clicks and costs. Yahoo claimed the content match and sponsored search results added up to more than 34 million clicks and would cost my account more than $67 thousand. Despite my shock, I grabbed a screenshot and saved it. My faith and confidence in Yahoo search marketing is getting rattled a little bit. Not sure if I should trust the accounting and tracking provided by Yahoo.

Just before writing this post I checked my account again, now everything looks normal. Everything is back to the normal levels of hundreds instead of millions. Has anyone else experienced this type of error? Is it common, should I expect more problems and inaccurate counts in the future from Yahoo? I'll post the screenshot if you want to see it. I think I might frame it or put it on a cafepress tshirt.

 

Okay, I'm going to add the screenshot as an attachment to this post. If that doesn't work I try another method. If you look at the inflated counts, even they don't make any sense because they are not added together, they seem to be duplicate rows.

Avg CPC ($) 0.53
Impressions 34,655,328
CTR (%) 0.37
Clicks 128,128
Cost ($) 67,491.94

So I must have typed my post title with the wrong words. Yahoo showed there were 34 million impressions, not clicks. The apparent cost of $67k was for 128k clicks. But still, this was very strange, has anyone else had these types of intermittent problems with their account?

 

Wow....

Thats an awesome pic...

Send it to shoemoney

 

hah that rocks

 

Happened to my account earlier also...No reason to worry though, because it was clear (to me) that I wasn't being charged for those clicks

 

Sounds like they need to put some new Yahoos in charge.

 

GTAce I'm glad to hear I'm not alone. The first thing I thought about was that one of my sites somehow became outrageously popular (no idea how that could've happened, because I doubt it was as a result of my Yahoo ads). I've heard stories of people getting the "slashdot" effect or similar surge of traffic to their site, then they get stuck with overage billing for ads, bandwidth and server resources. An event like that would give new meaning to working capital. But hopefully things would balance out with new sales, and fresh revenue.

 

Hey they did this to me also. Exact same numbers.... weird.

It went away after a few days.

edit: Today it says I spent over $2,000,000...

 

That is what they say I have spent.

 

ha ha ha hah a,
It just happened to me too, i got a reply that its due to an out rage

But i had one night having nightmares
You are lucky, i got the charge shown as 6lakh$

 

what do you mean due to an outrage?

 

This is insane! I can't believe YSM sometimes.

 

That's wild, bjgolf, your screenshot says more than 400 million impressions. What's your secret? haha

By the way, no alerts from Yahoo in my dashboard, and no emails to say there was a problem. I would love to hear more about what went wrong. I think their system was down for maintenance Friday or Saturday this past weekend. Could be related to that I suppose.

 

Hi there,

Some advertisers may have recently experienced some errors with the reports in the ad group level, which caused some advertisers’ reports to show spikes in numbers. These bugs have been fixed.

Thank you for your patience and all the feedback on this forum.

All the best,
YahooPete

 

Woah, you got some deep pockets there. Time to show that screenshot to wickedfire members

 

I was actually disappointed that the numbers weren't legit! Our UK Yahoo account was showing costs of £500,000 (a million bucks, long live the dollar) but £15.3M in sales. So we were showing up with a ROAS of over 700%. Nice, but kinda like those dreams where you're rolling in money but wake up to find its not true and punch your wife (j/k!)

 

lol I would be to scared to get banned. If someone says somthing wrong they show no mercy

 

I thought YSM is prepaid...$3 per click? You will get some click.

 

It happened to most of YSM accounts.It was after yahoo did update to their site.

 

so you didnt get the traffic actually right..... it happened to me with adcenter but that time I got clicks worth $1000 and it generated sales and adsense click and got refund from MS.... I thought this is a similar case...