Wow, Yahoo search advertising sucks

Just for fun, I decided to try Yahoo’s search advertising for a little while. It’s been running for a few weeks now.

Here’s my take on a series of aspects of their service.

First, the initial reason I thought I’d try it: the keyword bid rates are lower. I figured they were lower for a reason, but thought it couldn’t be that bad. Boy was I wrong.

Before I spend the rest of this article trashing Yahoo, I should note that in addition to the lower rates, there are a couple of small UI elements to their management system that are nice.

In particular, I like the graph and corresponding data to help you see what a particular keyword bid will likely generate in traffic, what position it will be, etc. Obviously, they’re all rough estimates, but it’s still helpful.

That said, overall the interface is still clunky and slow. This itself isn’t a huge liability if only because their competitors’ interfaces aren’t really any better. That said, it could be an asset if they’d put some thought and work into it.

The real problem is click fraud. Lots of click fraud. In fact, tons and tons of click fraud. And I cannot find any way to mitigate it; I’ve tried.

I disabled content network advertising, leaving only sponsored search enabled. That didn’t help. Apparently millions of squatted domains, all masquerading as pathetic search sites, have their advertising powered by Yahoo or Yahoo’s Overture brand. This appears to be the major source of the click fraud.

The patterns are really remarkable. The visitors (I hesitate to call them that as I’m confident most of them are malware running on Windows machines) all claim to be running IE 6.0, usually visit 2-4 pages, the last one most frequently being a sign up page, and then disappear. More interestingly, if they encounter a redirect, they don’t follow it about half the time (which is a total giveaway).

The http requests are all spaced out by 1-3 seconds, which would only happen on dial-up if they were real humans. Given the focus of my advertising, I’m quite sure there aren’t any dial-up users clicking on my ads legitimately.

I tried manually blocking the problem domains. Traffic would certainly quit from those, but it would just come from somewhere else. It’s a giant game of whack-a-mole that can’t be won. Even automating it wouldn’t help: Yahoo has a limit of 500 blocked domains.

I even contacted their support asking for help. I got the usual form response that wasn’t helpful and flat out ignored all but one of my questions.

In a way it’s all quite fascinating. If you want to know why Yahoo’s search advertising platform is failing miserably in the marketplace, this is it.

Even at the reduced CPC rates, the cost per qualified click is higher than Google.

In short, Yahoo sucks. Their advertising platform is useless. I’m amazed at just how horrible it is. I never would have guessed it could possibly be this bad. If you’ve ever been tempted to try it, don’t bother.