I’ll have to give it a shot. I’m not a pro quite yet with creating GA filters – but I’m learning quick. Once I figure it out, I’ll write a post on it (how novel, right?).

@ Christine,

Yeah – your first step should be to get your utm_source tagging started to tracking your Yahoo! traffic in GA. An advanced filter will be step 2. Once I get something figured out, I’ll post it to the blog.

No problem on responding to the comments. That’s what we’re here for!

Referral
(.*)
Campaign Source?

Try it on a throwaway copy of your profile.

Right now I am slowly integrating (to avoid an account wide increase in cost) new destination urls in my Yahoo ads to track the ppc campaign/adgroup/keyword in GA. However, I don’t think this addresses what you are referring to. I checked referring sites in GA (after I talked to the rep) and I did have to visit them to see if they had Yahoo search implemented. My guess is that isn’t the most time effective way to do it

I like it. Start the new Yahoo?! movement. (imagine saying that with the inflection of a question – hilarious in conversation)

@ Christine,

If you’re actually getting a spike in clicks leading to that big of a spike in cost-per-conversion – I’d be banging down Yahoo?!’s doors too. Glad you were able to get a refund on those.

My question to you would be have you found the right GA Filter to attach the full referral info to track Yahoo?!’s search partners in Analytics?

There weren’t any seasonal differences (resulting in increased impressions) and the same adgroup/keyword for Adwords wasn’t affected by the spike either time.

Yahoo told me that its advanced match could have shown the ad to more partner sites in their network for that month/week/day. They said the only way to combat this is to run reports and calculate which sites were generating the most invalid clicks and block them. Of course, this would have to be done on a regular basis with full Yahoo analytics set-up (I am currently trying to implement it through GA though).

There have been a few occasions where impressions have spiked (relatively speaking) for a few clients. However, the impression spikes haven’t affected click or conversion volume. I do monitor the Click Filter under “Traffic Quality Reports” and in the case where I’ve seen a spike in impressions, I haven’t seen a direct correlation to increased invalid click activity.

That being said, what exactly is Yahoo! refunding to you? Are your impression spikes resulting in click spikes as well?

My comment is related, but not entirely, to this post. Has anyone noticed crazy exponential increases in impressions for keywords from time to time. I have reported it 3 times in the last few months, and got refunds for two of them. They said they had an internal error with the advanced match feature or suspicious click activity, etc. One of my adgroups had a keyword impression average that went from around 6,000 monthly, to over 50,000 only 3/4 of the way in the next month!!!

So after talking to them about my last refund being about 1/6 of what I should have received, I got the run-around about advanced match and Yahoo partner sites.

Bottom-line, check your keyword impressions from week to week or month to month, you may notice it too!

I like your thinking – “new level of begging.” That about sums it up. Thanks for commenting!

@ Josh,

Holy Crap! They actually shut off an account??? Was the account performing well based on your own goals? If so, what in the heck would cause Yahoo! to turn off an account due to relevancy issues? I’d be on the phone with someone at Y! trying to get an answer on that one. Let me know if there is any more information you can share on this!