Yahoo Sponsored Search Discloses Ad Placements…And More
A week ago Yahoo announced a new feature/report for Yahoo Sponsored Search advertisers, the Ad Delivery Report. In short, it’s a report that tells you where your ads are being shown across Yahoo’s (vast) network, along with performance data. It’s a helpful report to run, and discloses just how many different sites Yahoo places your ads on. In fact, the report we ran for a relatively small client returned a list of sites so long (almost 4000) that it’s more like running a content campaign in Adwords than a search campaign. This may go along way toward explaining why CTR tends to be quite a bit lower for paid search campaigns in Yahoo Sponsored Search compared to both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.
Once you’ve run the report, you can see which domains are under-performing and block those (go to Administration >> Account General Information), although Yahoo limits you to 500 blocked sites. (Unfortunately Yahoo won’t allow you to block their own domains.) For the aforementioned client, barely 5% returned even a single click. Not surprisingly, search.yahoo.com generated most of the traffic, although not by as huge a margin as we’d expect, and it was far from providing the best ROI.
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September 29th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
[…] last week we looked at Yahoo’s Ad Placement Report, how it can help optimize your Yahoo PPC campaigns and how discloses the huge number of sites […]
October 7th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Good effort but 500 is still too low. You hit the maximum really fast and it seems to have different networks of fraudulent domains for all types of keyword niches. So it’s far from being enough. The block domain feature is only available for YSM US/CAN/IT/ES/DE/FR. It should be possible to block bad domains in ALL YSM markets. YSM scandies market send 99.9% of fake clicks and there are no way to turn bad domains off. Not fair!