About a year or two ago, Yahoo began allowing advertisers to block certain domains from showing any of their ads. This was a step in the right direction that has helped advertisers trim the fatty, non-converting traffic sources from their Yahoo accounts. Now, Yahoo has increased the limit from 250 up to 500 domains that can now be excluded.
Like I said, this was a step in the right direction, but Yahoo is still not taking enough steps to provide a great marketplace for its advertisers. Excluding domains is good if 1) you’re tracking the domains your traffic is coming from and 2) the source of the traffic is consistent. Many advertisers are not tracking Yahoo to the domain level and therefore don’t have the information to exlcude the worst domains. Secondly, it seems like the worst offenders for Yahoo’s network are sites that are running arbitrage or control their traffic and can easily create a new site and divert the traffic if they notice clicks or CPCs going down.
I’m not saying that arbitrage or these other types of sites are all bad, but it seems like a disproportionally high percentage of the poor converting Yahoo sources end up being these types of sites. I think that there is a place for arbitrage sites as long as they can provide value to the advertiser.
Search Engine Roundtable highlights a webmasterworld member’s comment that there should be the option to exclude all Yahoo Search Partners. This was exactly my thought when I first read the headline. With Yahoo’s current situation, I can’t see Yahoo giving its advertisers that option as they’re always too worried about a big decrease in revenue, but I think they’re missing out on the big picture. As an advertiser, over the past year I’ve been spending less on Yahoo and more on Google. With Yahoo, I’ve been finding that my keywords can have drastically different results from day to day and week to week. They could be bringing in consistent traffic volume at a positive ROI and then all of a sudden, I’d see a spike in traffic - without the expected increase in conversions. Their new minimum bids don’t seem to help either since it’s basically just an added tax for the same quality and volume.
In terms of time management, I’d rather spend my time optimizing and growing my Google account rather than always making changes on Yahoo and having to watch the account like a hawk. I’m still holding out for them to make their network quality better, but I’m not holding my breath.
Related posts
