MadPPC

The Yahoo! Smash and Grab – Yahoo!, I believe, is so wound up about making more profit for their swaying company, that they are willing to throw new marketers under the bus.  There’s no other logical explanation.  When I first started marketing with Yahoo! and discovered all these “undesirable” sites my ads where being shown on, I was pretty pissed.

I don’t want to pay for my ad to show on a site I don’t deem quality enough – damn I sound like Google!  Nor should you be expected to pay for you ad to show on those sites, but it’s Yahoo!s rules.  I shot off an e-mail to Yahoo!s customer service about not being able to pick and choose what sites my ad was shown on, this is what I got back:

Hello Brad,

Thank you for contacting us in regards to blocking traffic from partner sites, we’re glad to help.

Unfortunately, there is not a way to opt out of receiving traffic from all of our partners [1], 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:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/start/overview_trackurl.html

Once you have determined which domains you want to block, go to the Administration tab in your account and click the “Submit Domains” link. Complete the provided steps to block (or unblock) the domains.
…
Please note that it can take as many as three business days [2] for a newly submitted blocked domain to take effect.
…
You may want to take quality-based pricing [3] into account before blocking domains. 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. We assess the quality of the source [4]
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.

Also keep in mind that the quality of traffic coming from a particular site can improve over time [5] . If you block a domain and never unblock it to check its quality, you may be losing out on valuable traffic. [6]

Orly?!

[1] What I like to call easy “Smash and Grab”  Since you can’t opt out and you have no idea where you ads are being shown, they are basically going to just pocket your money at least for one click from that site.  Hence increasing there profits tremendously, imagine even just one extra click over all the Yahoo! accounts.  Now imagine that times at least 30.  *cha-ching!*

[2] 3 business days just to rape you, and everyone else, a little harder and rack up those extra charges.  Why it would take up to 3 business days is not totally clear, but could be from a multitude of reasons off the top of my head.

[3] It would be awesome if somewhere you could actually see this in action.  Until I do I can’t possibly actually believe that they have such a thing.  How do they really quantify it?  They are full of shit IMHO.  Blocking all these sites gives me a lower CPC because I have a higher CTR, and hence a better Quality Index Score.

[4] Again, how do they determine quality?  Are they running campaigns and can tell me how there offers are converting off of those pages?  Doubtful.  They probably think it’s totally cool and relevant that when someone searches for something on some spammy search engine that ad results are quality.  A crock of bullshit IMHO to try and keep you on it.

[5] Could but not overly likely, and I’m willing to bet on the under.

[6] I blocked it in the first place because it had shitty traffic!  It should be Yahoo!s job to update me if the traffic gets better, and then I’d re-review it.  Then again they would probably just be blowing smoke up your ass.

I’m going to keep digging into this Quality-Based Pricing they seem to have, and as always I’ll keep you guys updated.