Comments on: Beware of a New Click Fraud Scam on Yahoo’s Search Partners

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:04:40 +0000

@Dave Let’s hope that after Bing-Hoo they have higher standards for partners.!

By: Dave J.

Dave J. — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:43:42 +0000

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

By: @dlukauskas

@dlukauskas — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:48:48 +0000

@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!

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Sat, 22 May 2010 11:57:06 +0000

@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!

By: Angela

Angela — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:37:57 +0000

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.

By: Bonnie Schwartz

Bonnie Schwartz — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:16:02 +0000

@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/

By: David T

David T — Wed, 12 May 2010 20:48:20 +0000

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!!

By: Bonnie Schwartz

Bonnie Schwartz — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:38:40 +0000

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.

By: Angela

Angela — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:26:43 +0000

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.

By: Mark Kennedy

Mark Kennedy — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:12:45 +0000

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.