Beware of Yahoo “Search” Partners
December 7th, 2009 by Nate LinnellHave you ever really taken a hard look at where your Yahoo PPC traffic is really coming from? Recently I was working on a web analytics project for a client and was doing a deep dive into their referring sites. I noticed a number of sites that were driving a fairly high number of visits, but none of them were converting. I dug deeper and began to notice some strange abnormalities.
These sites appeared to be some of the “made for adsense” type sites that only have ads. They had some navigation and a search box, but everything always led to ads. I could see that all the traffic coming from these sites had PPC tracking strings so I figured it was from the Google content network.
Google AdWords, however, wasn’t reporting any clicks from any of these domains. I was a bit perplexed and so I went back to take a closer look at the tracking stings. I was very surprised to see that they were from Yahoo. The reason why I was so surprised was that the client isn’t running on the Yahoo content network.
I figured somehow the content network had been turned on by mistake, but that was not the case. I kept poking around Yahoo and to my surprise found a Referrer report (which apparently is new as of the middle of October). There I could see all the sites that Yahoo apparently deems to be “search” partners when in fact the only available content on the site are Yahoo ads.
In a few campaigns well over 50% of the monthly budget had come from these so called “search” partners with zero conversions. These domains are now blocked, but that doesn’t mean the client or I am happy.
There will need to be follow-up calls with Yahoo to figure out how these sites can possibly be regarded as “search” partners. In addition Yahoo only allows you to block 500 domains, so what is the client supposed to do once they reach that threshold?
Many questions still need to be answered, but I would strongly suggest doing a deep analysis using your web analytics data to see where exactly Yahoo is showing your ads.
Related posts:
Nate, you just need to enact the network distribution feature and just eliminate that traffic. See: http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-marketing-adds-network-distribution-improved-importing-33504.
Forget about excluding up to 500 websites, it’s a joke and Network Distribution will keep the Good search network traffic you want.
I blogged about this same issue back in September: http://blog.search-mojo.com/2009/09/16/make-yahoo-syndicated-search-a-no-parking-zone/
But with Network Distribution enable it’s a non issue now. Now all we have to do is hope that Bing keeps the feature.
Welcome to the world of GPT. These sites are signing up to portals termed GPT (Get Paid To…) sites where thousands of users Get Paid To go to these sites and click on Ads and one step further is to fill out leads. Typically some of the names or email addresses will show hints of this traffic. Such as freepoints@hotmail.com, gptgamer@yahoo.com or cashmaker@msn.com. Check out sites such as simplegpt.com and squishycash.com. If you sign up to these sites you can see the offers telling people to perform this activity for as little as 1 cent and typically they can do it at least once every 24 hrs. Google does a fairly good job at policing this traffic. Yahoo is horrible at policing this. We have pointed this traffic to Yahoo many times, provided screen shots from these sites and direct proof yet the sites are still up. It does little good to blacklist the sites as the companies that are doing this just keep buying new domains and add the same template.
Until Yahoo decides to stop ignoring this fraudulent activity I would suggest not using Yahoo Search Fraud Partners.