Yahoo! Calculating Clicks Correctly?

[bendergirl]

We have entered some Sponsored Search accounts in Yahoo about a month ago.

Today I was looking around at the reports on Yahoo about our click through rates. Yahoo's reports for example say we had 500+ click throughs last week. That seemed really high to me knowing our daily page views.

My Web Statistics Software says we had 74 'visits' from Yahoo last week.

Furthermore in the 'phrase source' report in my stats program, there are phrases typed in Yahoo for a local tv station for example where my stats say 14 'visits' for the week and Yahoo says over 250 'clicks' for these same phrases.

Am I looking at this correctly? Am I comparing apples to apples?

If anyone can help me figure this out, it would be great. If we're really getting these visitors, that's great, but I just don't want to pay so much if we're not.

[psllo]

You could be experiencing click fraud; you can refer to the other post about someone experiencing the same issue. If you notice that your CTR and click volume increased by a significant percentage all of a sudden, it should raise a red flag that something is not right. In your case, I suspect click fraud.

[bendergirl]

But even if it is click fraud, wouldn't my stats still show it as a visit (albeit a short one) on my site? :confused:

[Chris Boggs]

"visits" are generally defined as lasting a certain period of time or pages navigated. There could be many click-throughs not measured in your analytics package as a "visit" or "session."

[psllo]

Hi Chris,
What is the typical drop off rate from a click to a visit? Just curious to know if there is usually a rule of thumb to work off of.

Thanks!

[Chris Boggs]

sorry psllo but the answer to that question could vary greatly depending on a number of factors including the industry, quality of the page entered, calls to action, time for page to load, etc...

Many advanced tracking systems will measure this for your particular site.

[ppcuser]

It is important to implement your own tracking system for clicks received via any ppc service being utilised, i.e do not rely solely on 3rd party information or from the service provider.

It is a relatively straightforward process to implement your own recording/log of clicks received in real-time mode, providing e-mail notifications if required.

It is far better to have such a system, notifying immediately that clicks occur and providing click identification values (date/time, ip address, http_referer, ...).

The implementation of such a system does require some basic programming effort (probably using ASP or PHP technology), or even you may wish to consider activating the tracking system provided by Yahoo! itself.

The objective is to acquire as much information as possible about each click. And on a daily basis, perform reconciliation of the clicks reported by Yahoo! and your own logs - although these values may not be exactly the same, they ought to be very close, any major discrepancies merits further investigation.

Any ppc advertising campaign requires continuing monitoring - it is not sufficient to only occasionally examine reports - it is essential to keep informed of (i.e. 'manage') all account activity, preferably in real-time mode, certainly on a daily basis.