2 Responses to “Yahoo Search Marketing Content Match Delivers Untargeted Traffic”

1. Don Harrold Says:
   November 8th, 2005 at 3:03 am

   Dude, you gotta be kidding me. You have GOT to pursue that. Check this out, we stopped our Overture campaign this summer because our traffic skyrocketed and our conversions PLUMMETED. Overture took about $15K from us over 90 days before we finally realized we were getting HAMMERED.

   Please keep us posted on this.

2. Albany Lawyer Warren Redlich Says:
   January 6th, 2006 at 4:09 pm

   I just had a spike in Yahoo Content Match clicks yesterday and today (1/5/06 and 1/6/06). This was more than 10x normal. The clicks do not seem to show up in my Google Analytics tracking either.

   I came in this morning to an e-mail saying my account was offline for insufficient funds. I logged in, saw the unusual clicks, shut down that category, and added money so my account would go back online. I submitted a couple of support requests and got an automated notice that there would be a response within 24-48 hours. No big deal.

   Little did I know that the problem was ongoing. I went out for a few hours and came back to a new message saying my account was offline for insufficient funds. Apparently Yahoo was catching up to additional clicks that didn’t show up on reports (and as yet, still don’t).

   I called Yahoo customer service and they gave me the number for Overture, which apparently runs this stuff. 866-924-6676. To be fair, in both calls I did get to a person fairly quickly. In the second call, after an initially unsatisfying conversation, I did get a manager fairly quickly who was a bit better.

   One important point — the amount of click charges I could see on the management screen did not add up to as much as the money I had added — less than half. But my account still has a negative balance. The overture personnel apparently saw the same numbers I was seeing, and thus could not explain why my balance was negative. She said that the reports are a few hours slow.

   Time for specific gripe #1: How is it that they can bill for clicks right away but can’t make the clicks show up in reports right away. Sounds like their first priority is on getting paid, not on providing information to their advertisers.

   They offered to do an investigation, and said it could take up to 10 days. I can understand that - seems a little long but I can let that slide. I asked them to let my account run with a negative balance while they did the investigation. I’m not throwing good money after bad. They refused. This is specific gripe #2. When it looks like there’s an anomaly, and a good customer (I’ve been advertising through Yahoo/Overture for > 1 year - a long time in this world), you should defer to the customer on something like this.

   Gripe #3 is right on the message of your blog post. Content Match is already sketchy. Search advertising works because people appear to be looking terms you’ve chosen. Content match is much less reliable. I don’t even do content match on Google any more. If the search engines aren’t careful, they will eventually lose out on content advertising because advertisers will decide it’s too unreliable.

   Albany Lawyer Warren Redlich
   http://www.redlichlaw.com/main.html