I’ve recently started using Yahoo! Pay Per Click services, which on the surface looks very good. However, after a short time I noticed I was paying for clicks from junk sites with names such as “casinorip.co.uk”, “freedating.co.uk”, “Petgrooming.co.uk” and “couponmountain.co.uk”. These have clearly been set up to generate PPC leads and are not only low quality sites, but are totally irrelevant to what I do.
I thought maybe I had the “Content Match” option in Yahoo selected, which by design sends out your PPC ads to “selected” (read – “anyone who has a Yahoo! search box on their site”!) partners. But I hadn’t, so I emailed Yahoo to ask what was up. Their reply was that this is part of the “Sponsored Match” option (the one that gets your ads alongside Yahoo search results), and anyone using a Yahoo! search box on their sites also carries your ads: “We would like to inform you that the only option in order to prevent that your ad is displayed outside the Yahoo! Search Box is through the Block Domains tool, as the platform is designed to show your ads in the whole Yahoo! Network“.
Wtf? So basically, you can’t stop your advert appearing on junk sites and you are expected to not only block every site you don’t like the look of manually (note, a maximum of 500 blocks allowed), but also pay for the priviledge!
Have to say I was quite shocked. While Yahoo say you can file a report to get your money back if you think it’s low quality traffic, who in the hell is going to make a note of every click from every junk site, the cost of each and file a report? I certainly don’t have the time or inclination. Back to the PPC drawing board I guess.