Well I haven't talked about Yahoo's PPC program Yahoo search marketing for a long time. It's not that I want to ignore it but I feel there isn't much happening with Yahoo. We rarely recommend Yahoo Search Marketing to our client these days.
It's only because it rarely converts. Comparing 5 recent clients we did with YSM with 5 recent clients of Google Adwords almost its 0-5 in conversion. Google Adwords convert much better than YSM. Most of our clients recommend us to stop using Yahoo search marketing for their PPC campaign.
So why is this happening and can you still make money from YSM?
I really don't know the exact reason why this is happening. I feel it might be the same type of users that are clicking from Yahoo compared to Google. Why this difference? Is it because the clicks might be fraudulent? But yahoo signed up with click fraud a click fraud prevention company and some companies have rated high their capabilities to avoid click fraud effectively. So what is causing this drop in conversion, I feel it could be that most of yahoo users are not exactly looking to buy stuff.
They might just be clicking because they want to know what the product is about. Recently we got a blast from one of our client for spending 3000$ in Yahoo PPC without any reasonable conversion. We talked to Yahoo about it and they replied saying all are valid clicks and nothing can be done.
I have heard stories of people making money with YSM but personally I was rarely successful. When you use Yahoo search marketing make sure you give it a try with limited budget and if it works go ahead and spend money on it.
Labels: yahoo
I have an interesting thing happen regarding Pay Per Click.
Oct 2009
I was getting a lot of click fraud on my Yahoo search marketing. Clicks not from searches, but from all these "nonsense" names sites, like stopglorify.info, www.qualityconformist.com, etc.etc.
I researched logs and it shows redirects from this company QuantCast.com, a data-mining company.
The clicks I am recieving from these nonsense sites, are becaust quantcast.com set up all these "parked domain" mini-search engines that are ONLY linked to adsense/yahoo sponsered search sites.
So I am getting clicks from these no-content sites, that are sites filled with nothing but adsense arbitrage sites, that are no content al all, just pages filled with 100% links to Adwords ads.
Nonsense names Examples:
~ www.qualityconformist.com
~ www.stopglorify.info
~ www.sephalo.com
~ www.marketplacegains.com
They have search bars, for you to search a kw, which then redirects to thses adsense sites. So when you search for a keyword example: quit smoking, you notice a redirect to quantcast, then to
the nonsense name (above) pages with 100% adsense links.
Now, the owners of these sites can go in, using these redirects, and self-click on my ads to make adsense revenue all day. I get charged .80 cents a click..all day. They put up zillions of these adsense sites in Keyword silos -- like quit smoking -- and bang us advertisers all day with these fake clicks. $16 to 20 bucks a day
(whois shows some sites are registered to ns1. parkingspa.com.)
I have had to stop advertising on Yahoo PPC.
Part II
Just yesterday, I recieved a notice of class action lawsuit, levied towards Yahoo for this parked domain click fraud stuff.
And what do you know? The guy at yahoo who was responsible for this click fraud stuff, Todd Teresi, left yahoo.com is now a Chief revenue Officer at Quantcast!
I guess he is up to his old tricks that he used for click fraud at Yahoo.com, at quantcast.com.
that resulted in this
class action lawsuit here: www.inreyahoosettlement.com
The management team of Quantcast includes alumnus from Fortent, Orbital Data and Transium, some serious research companies.
What resource can we use to protect ourselves against these determined sophisticated data miners who have created an embedded click-fraud empire?
Hiring paid "clickers" to use Quantcasts mini "search engines" (to conceal their path from a Quantcast redirect property), so they can click on pricey adsense/Adwords is criminal to me. Your thoughts?
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