MadPPC

As my quest of figuring out why Yahoo! sucks so badly, I take all the major issues to them trying to get some answers.  This is the letter:

Hello,

A while back I had talked to support and they mentioned something interesting to me.  They mentioned something called Quality-Based Pricing and that :

“This feature helps mitigate the effect of traffic that may not perform as well as others. Quality-based pricing is a method for adjusting your cost-per-click, based on our assessment of the quality of traffic that you receive from a source within our partner distribution network.”

So I’m wondering if there is a way to tell how much I’m being charged per click from these various websites?  I have never seen anything in the interface about it.  Is there a Quality-Based Pricing tab I’m missing?  Furthermore it was also mentioned:

“We assess the quality of the source of our partner’s traffic when you are charged for a click from that source. Depending on the quality of the traffic from the partner source where the click came from, the cost per click may be discounted by a certain percentage.”

How, and what criteria, is used to determine a partner traffic quality and worth?  Is there a rating we can see for the partner site?  Also noted was:

“Also keep in mind that the quality of traffic coming from a particular site can improve over time. If you block a domain and never unblock it to check its quality, you may be losing out on valuable traffic.”

Don’t you think it would be more valuable to alert marketers that a traffic source has gotten better?  We – after all – blocked it for many reasons including:  poor quality of traffic, no knowledge of Quality-Based Pricing, and the inability to track said traffic.  Which brings us to one of the more pressing issues with using Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM):

“Unfortunately, there is not a way to opt out of receiving traffic from all of our partners, however you can block specific domains which have resulted in poor traffic for you. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.

The best way to determine where your traffic is being referred from is to monitor your web logs. For more information on how to read your web server logs, please see the following link:”

Which brings us to one of my major questions, why should I have to look at my logs to see where traffic is coming from?  Do you understand that if I could actually track my CTR, impressions, and conversion rates from a traffic source – I might gee – use it.  That in turn makes you more money.  Furthermore all these crappy, spammy “partner” sites pile on top of your stats and make them look a lot worse then what they should be, causing your CTR to drop and costing the advertiser more CPC.

Now most Internet Marketers (IM) and Affiliate Marketers (AM) are pretty displeased with the traffic you provide, however most of them haven’t dug as deep as I have to try and find the answer.  You could have a great thing, but the IM community would like to wonder why these problems exist, and why you don’t want our money.

I’ll let you know when they respond.