Dear Mr. Jerry Yang
I have been a customer of Yahoo Search Marketing a couple of months now, and I’d like to send you a feedback.
First off, I want to say that Yahoo’s customer service FAR exceeds that of Google’s; much faster email responses, an actual listed phone number, etc. (I still urge that the management team constantly seek ways to improve its customer service, though.) I sincerely hope, for my personal interests as well as the interests of other advertisers, that Yahoo’s search deal with Microsoft would succeed and to bring down Google’s monopoly on advertising.
However, I am quite unhappy with Yahoo’s tools and traffic quality.
1. There is no way to block my advertising to a user based on his/her IP. As you know, not all clicks convert. Of course, I understand that. But there are “competitors” who are clicking on my ads – to either drive up my costs or to see what I’m doing. My company has its my own analytics so I can tell who’s doing this on regular basis, so I would like to block IPs on campaign basis.
2. There is no way to “block” publishers who are engaged in click fraud – This statement is not to make an assumption that Yahoo is in any way condoning or encouraging click fraud, but I would also safely assume that no one company can track every click fraud coming through its system. If your platform passed the publisher ID via tracking URL, an advertiser like me can see trends and request Yahoo to block a publisher based on his ID.
3. There is no way to “block” delivery of ad to mobile devices. Currently, I have to submit to a Yahoo Search Marketing rep via email to do this.
4. (The MOST important point feature I would like to see) There is no way to block delivery of ad to parked domains.
Regarding #4, let me clarify.
I am aware of this existence of ad feed that is syndicated to companies that have good traffic base, like 2nd tier search engines, parked domain companies, etc. I also understand that companies like FastBrowserSearch.com, charter.net, openDNS, and a plethora of other companies have access to this feed.
I am not certain if you are aware, but this feed sometimes gets sub-syndicated to companies whose whole business model is to arbitrage this feed. Buy cheap traffic from Google, 7search, etc. and drive it to a parked domain where there is nothing but more ads (i.e. ads from Yahoo ad feed). While certain big advertisers are aware and may not care, smaller and mid sized advertisers like myself are greatly affected by these companies that do nothing but gauge money. These companies provide zero value to the advertiser and while some traffic may convert, I find them utterly unacceptable.
In fact, these arbitrage companies cloak on Google, hide/cloak their referrer, register ridiculously long names (usually .info), and all kind of other dirty tactics that do nothing but extract advertiser’s hard earned money.
Currently, the only way a YSM advertiser can “block” them is one by one via “Block Domain” feature. First of all, most advertisers do not even know where their Yahoo traffic is coming from (i.e. they don’t really check HTTP referrer and at least 10-15% of the traffic do not even have HTTP referrer). Second, even if they did have access to this info and can figure out which referrers were bring in bad traffic, you would have to go through ONE by ONE to see which site is a parked domain. In another words, while Google makes it a one click option for its advertisers, Yahoo is asking its advertiser to spend time and money checking each and every traffic source.
I understand that parked domain traffic a big revenue source for big advertising companies like Yahoo. But I strongly ask Yahoo to provide an option to its advertisers to opt out of this traffic source, along with the other three features that I have requested. If your advertising development team is in need of consulting for this matter, I would be happy to oblige.
Help us help Yahoo.
Thanks.
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