Yahoo Performance Drop

[Discovery]

I don't post this to complain about my problems, I post it in hopes to see if this issue is more widespread than the four walls of my office.

I have seen significant increases in fraudulent clicks, poor conversion rates, bogus conversions, and higher CPC costs out of Yahoo SM. The latter of the two being the most significant change. This trend started at the beginning of this year and has slowly increased, with the last couple months going into a steep decline. This is a disappointing development especially since the 2007 panama turnaround had brought YSM back from the brink of extinction and eliminated the days of Overture and horrible click fraud. YSM was going in the right direction and we were excited to see what 2008 would bring.

We have turned off nearly all content advertising.
We now have turned off a number of complete campaigns.
Without an editor style tool it is far too time consuming and complex to make vast changes and test via the web interface. Our time is better spent managing SE campaigns that have these tools.

I should note that these same campaigns perform exceptionally well on Google and MSN.

Has YSM been trending downward for your company in 2008?

On a positive note, CS has been good at YSM and the web interface is still very good and fast, but it just can't compete with an editor style app which the other two SE's have. I hope Y! puts the same team who developed Panama in charge of developing an offline editor.

Discovery

[searchengineman]

We have also noticed click prices have become exorbitant, on major key terms. Some of the same terms in Britain were half the price on the Yahoo Network.

We were previously told that the yahoo content network was having problems in February that it should have been fixed by April 2008, we were advised by our rep to turn it off until further notice. Can anyone confirm this?

also heard a rumour that Yahoo may be altering or curtailing its Advanced Matching option. (Due to advertisers being served on words, they did not ask for). Unfortunately I did not find the direct source. Will follow up.

PS: Google kill Expanded Broad Match!

searchengineman

[michelle car]

check this out if your in the US - http://blog.efrontier.com/insights/2...-syndicat.html

and this, if you'r in the UK - http://blog.efrontier.com/insights/2...rch-syndi.html

In a nutshell, Yahoo's syndication network (not their content), is junk.

[michelle car]

Search Engine Man - this may be what you were referring to...

(this arrived from Yahoo last week)...

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We wanted to let you know that a limited number of keywords in your account that are currently linked to synonyms, or "mapped," will soon become unmapped to give you more control over your keywords. As you may know, we use various matching technologies to link some bidded keywords to other terms that a searcher might use synonymously to look for them. This mapping connects some keywords with related synonyms, such as "car insurance" with "auto insurance."

What's Changing
Recently, advertisers have voiced a need to manage some of these synonyms separately, so that they can use separate bidding and creative strategies, and business goals. To give you more control over your ads, we plan to remove a limited number of keyword mappings on July 29, 2008.

What does this mean for your account?
You may still receive traffic for these terms through the Advanced match type even after these terms are unmapped. For better control, however, we suggest adding these "new" terms to your existing account, along with new bids and ads. If you choose to add the new terms, keep in mind that they will be rejected as duplicates prior to July 29, if you are adding to the same ad group as your existing bidded term.
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This doesn't exactly give much detail as to what we're supposed to add back in - EVERYTHING that has been rejected in the past, or just certain synonyms (and which ones at that?!?!).

[Tracking90]

Discovery

We have experienced a serious drop in performance as well.

I'm guessing that Yahoo is under major pressure to increase profit margins so they have instituted the unmatching program and the keyword inatitivity intiative.

I wouldn't be suprised if Yahoo has instituted other programs to increase profits which may be having an adverse affect on performance.