The Secret Yahoo Doesn’t Want You to Know

May 7th, 2008 Tim White Posted in Blogging, Conversion Tracking, Lead Capture Pages, Marketing Mistakes, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Yahoo! |

Yahoo is great, but they have a secret and they’re not talking about it. Every month advertisers waste tens of millions of dollars because of it. How much are you losing?

When you signed up to advertise on Yahoo you probably thought your traffic was going to come from www.yahoo.com, right? The answer is that a majority of your “Yahoo” traffic is coming from Yahoo.com, but anywhere from 25-40% of it is coming from Yahoo’s search partners. So if you are spending $1000 with Yahoo per month, you are wasting between $3000 - $5000 annually! The good news is that you can do something about it immediately.

First, a little bit of background. Yahoo search partners are websites that send targeted traffic to your website within Yahoo’s sponsored search program. This is good for Yahoo because, through these search partners, they are able to generate millions of dollars in additional revenue every month. Yahoo pays these partners a percentage of the click revenue generated from their websites. In theory, this additional source of traffic is good for you (the advertiser) because of the additional traffic these partners are able to provide. More traffic, more sales, right? Not necessarily.

Here’s the secret: Most of Yahoo’s “search partners” spawn from the porn industry and are responsible for significantly more click fraud than Yahoo.com. By default, when you sign up with to advertise with Yahoo, you are also signing up to advertise with their search partners. Here’s just a sampling of their search partners:

www.embarq.com
www.faqs101.info
www.savemorenow.org
www.activeaudience.com
www.companymanual.net
www.goodsearch.com
www.instafinder.com
www.onestepsearch.net
www.shopperscompanion.org
www.tanesha.com
www.tbzi.com
www.uclickwefind.com
www.vortal.com

So what’s the solution? Yahoo allows you to block up to 250 of their search partners from displaying your ads. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Yahoo sponsored search account at https://marketingsolutions.login.yahoo.com.
2. Click on the Administration tab.
3. In the Account Summary to the right of Blocked Domains, click on Submit Domains.
4. Enter up to 250 Yahoo search partner domains that you want to block.
5. Click Submit.

Here’s the catch: Yahoo doesn’t provide a list of their search partners, so you need to check your website stats (specifically your referring url’s) and manually put a list together. This requires a lot of time and energy, so you might consider hiring us to do it for you. This is perhaps the single most important thing you can do to reduce your Yahoo costs.

I also highly recommend that you use Yahoo’s conversion tracking program. This doesn’t eliminate click fraud, but it does give you a very good idea of your cost per lead or sale.

Tim White is the founder of WhizClick and has been marketing online since 1994. He can be reached at tim@whizclick.com or 916.799.3999.