Yahoo Sponsored Results Showing Ads for FREE!!

sofomor · #1 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 11:43 AM

Hi guys,

What could be the reason if YAHOO sponsored results showing up your website without our consent. Ok in easy words, I'm not running any PPC campaign for my site and yet yahoo sponsored search is showing our website in its results.

What could be the reason? Competitor mischeif? Own error? Cross linking of othere PPC campaigns (provided that we have shut down every campaign on every PPC engine).....

Thank you

bj · #2 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 06:02 PM

You're not signed up to show in yahoo ad results? If you aren't, and aren't getting charged for the clicks I'd just keep my mouth shut.

advancedmerchant · #3 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 06:05 PM

Are you sure it is your site? A competitor may be bidding on your name, with a display name that looks like yours, but a target URL that goes to him.

Try clicking on one and see where you go.

GonnaLuvIt · #4 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 06:16 PM

Affiliates of yours will also bid on links to your site. Its a little trick they have because who would ever think to bid on your own domain name. They have thier affiliate coded url that links directly to you. So when someone searches your site, they see the sponsored ad first and now the affiliate get a % of the sale. Not bad for $.05. They did this to my site, accept I closed that program down, yet thier sponsored link is still up, hehe.

advancedmerchant · #5 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 06:42 PM

What is the site and search term??

bodag · #6 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 08:12 PM

If you have an affiliate program your affiliates are hijacking your branded terms and probably any relevant terms for your products and services. This is common place and believe it or not companies who think they have a great affiliate program are loosing out on big opportunities to increase their revenues by taking back control over the SEM efforts the affiliates are using as low hanging fruit.

deepsand · #7 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008, 09:08 PM

If anyone other than yourself is bidding for PPC ads on Yahoo using your name in their keywords/phrase, notify Yahoo, and they should remove such.

Unlike Google, Yahoo, unless they've quietly changed their rules since I last had to deal with this kind of problem, prohibits this practice.

jamesgreen · #8 (**permalink**) 03-31-2008, 10:49 PM

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:

deepsand · #9 (**permalink**) 04-01-2008, 08:36 PM

Quote:

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:

Actually, there are legitimate reasons for having the Display and Target URLs being different. And, Google does not require that they be the same; they may say so, but that's not what they do.

As for policies, Google's is actually the less fair; Google will allow one to bid on the Name of an entity to which they have no legal claim, while Yahoo will not.

The problem with Yahoo lies not in their policy, but in trying to get someone to understand what the problem is and then take the proper action to correct it.

jamesgreen · #10 (**permalink**) 04-02-2008, 09:19 PM

Actually since both Google and Yahoo want to make money from PPC advertisers, they accept most ads if the AD appears generally OK and if at all there's any problem, wait for someone to complain to investigate.

I believe that the Support staff at both Google and Yahoo do not possess indepth knowledge about online marketing tactics and that is the reason why many can get away with ADs that rip-off original stakeholders. The most frustrating part is that everytime you call customer support you speak to a tom, dick or harry and have to repeat the entire story
again and again...

JG

deepsand · #11 (**permalink**) 04-02-2008, 09:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamesgreen

Actually since both Google and Yahoo want to make money from PPC advertisers, they accept most ads if the AD appears generally OK and if at all there's any problem, wait for someone to complain to investigate.

In my experience, Google is much more likely to accept inappropriate PPC ads than is Yahoo.

Google's "editorial review" is automated, so that it's accept now, and ask questions later. Yahoo, on the other hand, uses automation only to prescreen for certain problems, with humans doing the bulk of the decision making. So, with Google you're trying to deal with the clueless in regards to the ads of others that shouldn't have been allowed, while with Yahoo you're trying to convince the equally clueless that your ad is in fact appropriate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamesgreen

I believe that the Support staff at both Google and Yahoo do not possess indepth knowledge about online marketing tactics and that is the reason why many can get away with ADs that rip-off original stakeholders. The most frustrating part is that everytime you call customer support you speak to a tom, dick or harry and have to repeat the entire story
again and again...

Worse yet, they know nothing about either the industry sector that you are running ads for or the audience to be targeted by your ads.

And, if you only have to deal with Tom, Dick and Harry you count yourself quite lucky indeed; as often as not, you also end up having to repeat everything to Jane, Ann and Mary Lou as well.

Google or Yahoo - either way it's a big time sink.

jamesgreen · #12 (**permalink**) 04-03-2008, 11:15 PM

yeah, I forgot about Jane, Ann etc...

sofomor · #13 (**permalink**) 04-09-2008, 08:22 AM

Guys it was a "sneaky affiliate" as Gonna & bodag explained earlier. Thanks alot all of you of sincere response...