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Watch Out for Yahoo’s Content Network
October 29th, 2008 | Amber | Content / Display Network, Yahoo! Search Marketing


We’ve mentioned before that you can’t have the “set it and forget it” attitude when it comes to managing PPC accounts. While reviewing my Yahoo! account a few weeks ago, I noticed that we had generated a ton of extra clicks and spend with zero conversions via the content network, which was completely out of the norm.  At the time, I went ahead and paused the content network in that one particular ad group. However, the next day I saw the same thing in two more ad groups in the same account.

I remembered that recently Yahoo! announced an improvement to their content network. “Content match now combines a better understanding of web page and ad content with insights from users’ geographic and behavioral profiles, says Yahoo!”  Despite their so called “improvement”, I emailed my Yahoo representative immediately to ask what was going on with my account.  Just yesterday, I got an email from him stating that the ‘click activity investigation’ was complete and they would be refunding my account $1300.00 for ‘invalid clicks’.

This just goes to show you MUST keep an eye on your accounts at all times for crazy things like this. And it never hurts to ask your reps what’s going on if you see something abnormal.  My recommendation, if you’re running PPC in Yahoo, check your  content network stats for the past few weeks, if you see an increase in clicks and spend with no conversions I would ask Yahoo to investigate your account as well.

Related posts:

  1. Managing the Content Network in Google and Bing
  2. What to Do When the Content Network Goes Haywire
  3. How To Exclude Domains from the Content Network
  4. Sunshine, Rainbows and Fraud on the Content Network
  5. Yahoo! Improves Content Match and Assumes Our Performance Will Improve Too

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 7:04 am and is filed under Content / Display Network, Yahoo! Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Pingback: » Have You Checked Your Yahoo! Content Network Campaigns Lately? Pay Per Click Journal - Pay Per Click Advertising Blog

  • http://www.portentinteractive.com Elizabeth

    Couldn’t agree more, the whole thing sounded sketchy from the beginning. Glad to see you got a refund though!

  • http://payperclickjournal.com Nick Stamoulis

    Putting auto pilot with PPC is such a bad idea. You need to be monitoring your account and what is going on it everyday. If don’t you could burn through cash so quickly.

  • Amber

    Elizabeth and Nick, thanks for reading! I couldn’t agree with you more.

  • OnlineMediaLimited.Com

    Particularly when you are dealing with Yahoo!

    Their search network used to have some of the worst quality in the market – I dread to think what would happen if you left the content network on ‘auto pilot’!

    Silv

  • http://www.merrillgoussot.com Merrill

    I worked for YSM for two years…and the first thing I did, now that I am on the client side was to switch off the Content match on all the Y! accounts I manage.

  • http://www.ppchero.com Amber

    Hi Merrill, can you explain any further what you learned about Yahoo’s! content network from your experience working there?

  • http://www.Addynamo.com Sean

    Another content network worth trying is Ad Dynamo

  • http://www.mediatownmarketing.com/ MediaTown

    PPC on auto-pilot is certainly not best practice. I’ve been suspicious about some work we are doing for a client. Thanks for the insight, I’m going to be emailing my account exec first thing on Monday. Thanks for the article. 

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