MadPPC

The inevitable truth – Yahoo! will do what it can to take your money, and if your not smart it will be parted from you promptly.

Whys that?  Because all the other sites are basically useless and cost you much more than without them.

All these other articles where building up to the actuality of why your taking it up the ass so hard, and it’s not hard to see.

There is a direct correlation between Impressions -> CTR -> CPC.  Now normally you’d think well, “(Clicks / Impressions) * 100  = CTR” and that basic principle still holds true.  However with Yahoo! Impressions hold their own significance – the fact that you can’t tell where they are coming from.

And because you have no idea where the Impressions are coming from it makes your CTR useless.  This all comes full circle as it:

1. Drives down your CTR super low.
2. Drives down your Quality Index Score, which is derived by CTR as far as we know.
3. Doesn’t allow you to get into a better place by bidding less.
4. In turn raises your CPC to keep it artificially inflated – and hence costing you a lot more money.

This should be called the “Yahoo Effect”.  Also the next time someone tells you that Yahoo!s traffic sucks, you can tell them why they are a “Yahoo”.

Fixing it is the most painful part - The least Yahoo! could do is allow us to fix this quickly and easily, but as mentioned before there is no “opt-out”.  Instead you have to grind through it.  It’s not only painful in the fact that it takes a little bit to do but it’s also burning a hole in your pocket, the “Yahoo Tax” if you will.

Follow these steps:

1. Set up proper tracking to capture referrers.  I’d suggest at least Prosper202.  You should be tracking all your ad data anyways.
2. Set up and run your campaigns,  wait for the clicks to start rolling in.
3. Check out all the referer’s that are not from a Yahoo! domain.  That being said you can’t block any Yahoo! related domains, like Yahoo! Answers.
4. I would suggest adding almost all the sites to the block list in your account*:  Administration -> Account General Information -> Blocked Domains -> Submit Domains.
5. Repeat 2 through 3 at least once a day until you stop seeing clicks coming from other domains.
6. Enjoy your better CTR and CPC.
7. Profit!

*You might find a diamond or two in the rough, but you can’t tell how many impressions you are getting from those sites, so they possibly make your data statistically useless.

What Yahoo! Should Do - Yahoo! struggles financially and they are at fault.  I’m sure anyone whom has worked a good amount with Yahoo! already knows this information, and has taken the steps twords eliminating the rogue sites.  Yet Yahoo! could make more money by – *gosh* – actually enticing us to advertise on those sites.

Those whom don’t know any better are still going to get gamed by Yahoo!, but we should have the ability to get access to this magical “quality based pricing” they told me about.  Does little good when it’s wrapped up with the rest of your clicks.  Or secondly, open up bidding on those sites and let the market decide how much they are worth, because they are worth a lot less than what your charging.

We should also have the right to see what our actuall CTR for anyone of those sites are so we can adjust accordingly.

This will probably never happen, but a guy can dream right?