Are Yahoo! Search Marketing ripping customers off?
I wouldn't normally post items on our blog like this but today I felt the need.
One of our customers spends 10's of thousands a month on there PPC campaigns, which is split between Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords. Their industry is very competitive and ad spends are getting silly as the vertical spins out of control, with companies floating left, right and centre.
What's CTR? Maximum bids are nothing when you've just got 10 million from investors :)
My beef with Yahoo! Search Marketing is their search network partners
So today we were running through four months of log files to see if we stood any chance of recovering some money from click fraud. I found all sorts of interesting results but the one that stood out more than the others was their referrers. Our customer's site does even appear in the top 200 places in Yahoo!, MSN or Google so you would expect the referrers to be mainly Yahoo! and Google. Oh and their search networks...
This is my problem 90% of the referrers are search partners in Yahoo!'s search network. That's ok 'traffic is traffic' I hear you say. Not from theses partners, all of the ones in our logs are only displaying paid ads, no search results, and they look as if they're only built to generate money???
OK, we'll switch off Yahoo!'s search network in the bid listings. No, apparently not, in the UK it is all or nothing. That was the answer I got when I phoned Yahoo! UK today. Don't get me wrong they were very helpful but it wasn't the answer we were looking for.
It's easily fixed
It could be easily fixed, Google's Adwords allows you turn search networks of at campaign level, why can't Yahoo! Search Marketing? They have version of Google's CTR ranking system coming soon so why not throw in a couple of radio buttons in the account setup at the same time? We can't be the only company requesting this feature.
Put up or shout up
I guess if you want to reach 7% of the UK's searchers then you will need to pay the price of un-targeted paid traffic, or at least allow for it in your budget and conversion costs. You didn't hear me say click fraud, did you?
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