Originally Posted by jamesgreen

Yahoo's PPC Policy is flawed.

I had a competitor bidding for my term and displaying my domain name as the display URL. However, the click took visitor to his site. As a result, my own Ad for the same term was not getting displayed since I was using the same URL for display and target - though may be because I was bidding less. I complained to Yahoo that the domain belonged to me and the advertiser was able to get away with unscrupulous act because Yahoo does not care if the display URL and the target URL are not same - not even the domain part, at least.

To drive home my point, I had to tell Yahoo Support whether they would accept an AD that says "Top PPC Program" and show Yahoo.com as display URL and then redirect users to Google.com using it as the target url. It was then the AD support guy understood my point. I even had to send a snapshot of the whois info to drive home my point that I was the owner of the domain being used in the AD by the other guy. The whole experience was frustrating.

Google seems to have got its act right and states that henceforth such Ads will not be permitted and that the domain name part in both display url and target url must match. (https://adwords.google.com/support/b...91451&hl=en_US)

Do you know, the same problem as Yahoo also exists with Microsoft Adcenter. I had to raise the same issue with them as the guy was running campaigns in Adcenter also, but response was pathetic. They asked me to file a Trademark violation form etc etc to get the matter investigated. All they had to do was to click the AD and then see where the user was led to. Simple. But they threw the ball back to me.

Then, I did something. I just contacted the affiliate manager of the program and complained about the issue and the message was delivered to the offender and Lo the squatting AD got removed no time!

Like it or not, Google is the one that understands the PPC game better and that is why they are #1.

JG: