Keep your ad off junk websites

[GAustralia]

Hello Searchwatch:

I wish to keep my PPC ad off of junk websites (as revealed in Google analytics) such as:
directinfos dot com
besttopwebsite dot com
abcjmp dot com

Content network is OFF.

Any ideas?

GAustralia

[bradbox]

GA, I think these sites use bad tactics to keep including your ads. I've had the same problem, and whether these companies are screen scraping the ads, or something else, I've never been able to prevent it from happening. I just see it as a fact of life on the Internet.

[GAustralia]

bradbox-

If there is nothing on a site and there are PPC coming from it, then it appears that the site owners are doing the clicking not any legitimate surfers.

No I do not like to accept it. It is not a static phenomenon.

GAustralia

[Nivik23]

I'm having the same problem and it's very annoying. In Google's Webmaster tools they list a host of domains that have links to my homepage, those links being Yahoo PPC Ad's.

I have tried to disable all my Yahoo Ad's from appearing on anything but Yahoo but am unable. Current campaign setting is sponsored searched on with standard search & content match off. I can't seem to find a way to enable the campaign to run JUST on yahoo.

The fix I'm going to try today is going through all the junk domains listed as linking to my site and adding them to Yahoo's blocked domains list. Hopefully that will work.

NiV23

[GAustralia]

Nivik23-

Sounds good. Also check out the wisdom of Discovery on a similar thread on Google Adwords.

I am very suspicious about Yahoo PPC. With my type of business I either talk with people on the phone or they send me e-mails. I ask where they heard about my business. No one has said Yahoo/MSN.

I think just about all the clicks from Yahoo/MSN are junk. What I might do is lower my bids. Most people have ignored Yahoo for some time and I have not adjusted my bids for a few years and I am still showing among the top several. There is not a whole page of bids as there is with Google so I might try to bid for the lowest position. So my strategy with Yahoo may now be just to get clicks on my website to help the Google popularity contest, and also hope to get a few legitimate customers.

GAustralia

[Nivik23]

I've actually had quite a bit of success with Yahoo. I've found though that Yahoo, more so than others imo, has a sweet spot in terms of bidding.

I once had a couple quarters that showed insane profit margins on Yahoo's campaign. So I figured I'd up my bidding / campaign budget. After which, quarter after quarter showed barely any profit. Readjusting the bidding / budget to previous levels, things came back in line.

As such when Google tells me that I should increase my budget, I usually do and the numbers stay pretty much the same in terms of CPA. I haven't found that to be the case with Yahoo so I limit my spending with them quite a bit.

Yahoo is typically my lowest Cost per Action, the action being someone filling out a contact form. Yahoo is also the lowest volume of the big 3 for me though.

As far as asking people on the phone how they heard about your company, in my experience 99% say "the internet". I leave it at that though as we're more interested in selling something first and worrying about the source later.

What I do is have the people answering the phones make a note of what day they called in on and what website they were on. If that call results in a sale eventually I then backtrack through my analytics package and find out where they came from. I can do this since our site has low traffic (~8K visitors/month). As traffic levels increase it becomes increasing hard to pin point those calls.

People who fill out forms are easy though. Just have a server side tracking program running that sends along all the information in the email in terms of how they found you.

I've also found that going through your analytics package quarterly and seeing what keywords people are using to get to your website from Yahoo and then adding negative keywords based upon that is helpful.

But when all is said and done, I trust Yahoo the least out of Google, MSN, Yahoo. I mean seriously, they just implemented day parting a few months ago?!? MSN / Google has had that feature for years and it's saved me no less than 25% of my spending while reducing my # of conversions by only 9%.

That and the fact that all the Ad's showing up on Junk pages are my Yahoo Ads. Is it so hard to offer a "Run my Ad's only on Yahoo" selection??

I would never bid for top position in Yahoo.

NiV23

[KSew]

You have an option of blocking up to 500 URLs in YSM.