Beware of a New Click Fraud Scam on Yahoos Search Partners
Recently in one of the accounts I manage on Yahoo, I saw a huge spike in volume.
Unlike most fraudulent clicks that will often cause a spike in your CPA as they do not result in conversions, what made this spike unique is that conversions also spiked over this same period.
Below is the graph of Clicks vs. Conversions:
Not much had changed in the account and there was no noteworthy press to speak of to explain this spike. My gut told me that the over 200% spike in clicks and the nearly 400% spike in conversions was unfortunately too good to be true.
I turned to Google Analytics to investigate my suspicion and evaluated the following:
- Were they from the same IP address?
- Were they from the same network?
- Were they from the same location?
The answer to all these questions was no.
Still not satisfied that these leads were legitimate, I reached out to my client to see if the leads looked real in their database. On the surface they actually did. The email addresses were different and the forms were filled out. It is important to note that the conversion in this case is a completed form. For this client the lead to sale turnaround time is about 2 weeks, so I told my client to let me know what the final lead to sale conversion rate was and how it compared to the websites rate on average.
Despite the leads looking legitimate on the surface, I still felt this spike was unrealistic and I did not want to wait two weeks before we found out that all these leads were not legitimate sales prospects. I turned to Yahoo new placement tool (no longer active), which was released in September 2009, to see if it was a particular search partner that was responsible for the spike.
I found my culprit, the domain, http://www.trafficz.com/. This one placement month over month increased over 2000% (that final 0 is not a typo), not two hundred, but two thousand percent!
Moreover, all the conversions were attributed to one keyword on standard match. I immediately excluded this placement from my account, as this one word in that one placement caused the entire spike.
Two weeks have gone by and it turns out my suspicions about the leads driven by Traffickz were confirmed. Not one of the leads actually resulted in a final sale. The typical conversion rate for this site in a 2 week period is MUCH GREATER than 0%. (I am not providing the actual conversion rate here to protect the confidentiality of my client)
I believe the forms were filled out were by a computer program with fake peoples information. What makes this type of fraud so hard to detect is that program made the leads look like they were coming from different IP addresses and geographic locations. This was not your ever day click spammer. These guys were sophisticated and I can see why Yahoos click fraud protection system did not catch these spammers automatically.
I have reported this click fraud to Yahoo and am still waiting for an answer. I am going to push hard for a credit on this one, as we are talking thousands of dollars of SPAMMY traffic. I am confident that the people at Yahoo will see this traffic for what it is, aka fraud, and provide the account with a credit.
This experience will not force me to abandon Yahoo all together, and I am not suggesting you do either. Yahoo comprises about 17% of all traffic and is a very important supplement to Google Traffic. Yet, for clients with limited budgets I may look to Bing before Yahoo when expanding. I would tell the people at Yahoo that they should choose their search partners more wisely for their long term success.
Though you should not completely write off Yahoo, I suggest the following to protect your accounts against this new form of click fraud keep the following in mind:
- Make sure you or your agency monitors weekly if not daily for any unusual spikes in traffic for each engine
- Click spammers are getting smarter making click fraud harder to detect using the usual measures such as IP address, location, bounce rate or conversion rate.
- Click Fraud does not only hurt your numbers at times by causing spikes in your CPA, but can also deceivingly help your numbers by increasing conversions.
- If something seems way too good to be true, it probably is.
- Fight for credits back to your account for fraudulent traffic.
- Make Yahoos Ad Delivery Report part of your optimization process and look for suspicious search partners to exclude
Posted: 01.11.10
Bonnie Schwartz:
Minutes after posting this, I just got word from my Yahoo rep that my account will be credited back a few thousand dollars for these fraudulent clicks.
Mark Kennedy:
Nice post, Bonnie. I’ve noticed the same thing for one of my clients and had to go through the same process. I wish they had a feature where you could opt out of the search partners like you can do on Google.
“Yet, for clients with limited budgets I may look to Bing before Yahoo when expanding.” I totally agree with that statement since I feel the quality has been better with MSN/Bing.
Bonnie:
@Mark Thanks for the comment. I agree Yahoo definitely needs the feature where you can opt out of search partners. At least you now have the ability to exclude placements, which is a step in the right direction.
Crystal:
Nice post Bonnie!
The new Network Distribution on Yahoo launching on the 19th may hopefully help alleviate some of the headaches we all face now!
Mark – your wish has come true!!
Bonnie Schwartz:
@Mark Kennedy It looks like our prayers have been answered! My Yahoo rep just informed me that on 1/19 we will have the following Targeting options on Yahoo
1) Entire Network-includes Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners
2) Yahoo! Search-includes all Yahoo! O&O properties and co-branded sites
3) Yahoo! Partners-includes all Yahoo! Partners
Mark Kennedy:
Wow! Maybe I should have wished for a million dollars instead. Who knew this blog was a genie lamp :)
Kidding aside, that’s great news and I can’t wait to try it out.
Angela:
Yahoo now officially has the option to opt out of search partners and only use yahoo search.. its under campaign settings for each campaign, under network distributions. But not all their search partners are bad.. I get better traffic from yahoo with partners turned on, then i do from google and their partners.
Bonnie Schwartz:
Thanks Angela! I agree, I definitely do not think you should automatically default to exclude all search partners. I think you should only do so, if you find that collectively these partner do not convert or do so less cost effectively than search itself. Also, you may find that excluding individual placements is a better bet.
David T:
I have read some posts on here – one from “Angela” states that there is a way to opt-out of the Yahoo Partner Network – this is ABSOLUTELY FALSE! There is no way to separate our pure Yahoo search traffic from the Yahoo Partner network – I have found that most of the Yahoo partners are GPT sites – all the leads we get from these partner sites are completely 100% bogus!
This started happening in Dec / Jan, 2010 and now i must consider dropping Yahoo PPC altogether – its just all spammy traffic!!
Bonnie Schwartz:
@David T: Thanks for your comment. I have also noticed lately that the quality of these partners is pretty awful. The positive news is that you can opt out of the search partners as Angela said.
You have to do this at the campaign level.
There is some more detail on this below:
http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/01/19/you%E2%80%99re-in-control/
Angela:
Hi David
Yes you really can opt out of search partners.. just look around. It’s under campaign settings and then “Network distributions” I wouldn’t lie! lol ,.. I use it for a few campaigns. Just simple uncheck the box for “search partners”
Also as a tip I noticed that one of their biggest search partners “aroundme.com” seemed to be getting a large portion of my impressions which turned into a large amount of clicks, which generated NO more conversions that normal. So beware of that site, I blocked them in my search partner list.
the best thing is: run a report for every campaign and see where you ads are appearing on the search network and take note of the conversions from each site.. also take note of how many impressions VS clicks you are getting by clicking the CTR column and looking at the lowest CTR’s… block the domains that have very high impressions and low clicks. It brings down your CTR if you do not block them, and then you will have higher cost per click in the total campaign.
Dont forget , late summer MSN adcenter and Yahoo ad center and merging into one and we will have to learn a whole new system.. so dont put to much effort into learning the current Yahoo! , as we will no longer need it come late summer or early fall.
Bonnie:
@Angela Good point on not spending too much time learning the current Yahoo! But Definitely still necessary to scour the ad reports in the mean time for red flags. I just got another credit for a completely different account that I referenced in this post for over 5K for what Yahoo referred to as “Partner Implementation Fraud’” – Whatever that means. I had to report the suspicious behavior, which was very troubling to me. 5K + of click fraud is not pocket change. Come on Yahoo!
@dlukauskas:
@dlukauskas
I saw the same domain in my clients Analytics account, although their robot works better than others that I’ve seen before coming from the Yahoo sponsored search, but what gave this one out was “Browser: 100% IE”
Thanks for the post!
Dave J.:
Bonnie, I’ve just posted my ‘experience’ with this problem. I just paused the account. Six clicks from yahoo.com in two weeks isn’t worth dealing with the morally bankrupt.
http://www.b2blog.com/2010/07/omg-yahoo-search-ppc-is-a-rip-off.html
Bonnie:
@Dave Let’s hope that after Bing-Hoo they have higher standards for partners.!