I got the email today - terminated due to poor traffic quality. Certainly due to international clicks - about 15% of my traffic is non-US. Yahoo looks very foolish when they blame publishers for this stuff. Here are their four reasons and why they are stupid: 1 - non-US traffic - stupid to expect thousands of small publishers to purchase a geolocation database and do the programming to avoid serving ads to non-US visitors. Smarter to do it in one place, the backend. Maybe Yahoo's programmers aren't good enough. 2 - suspicious clicks - yes, of course, must ban for this, but there were none 3 - poor conversion - the fault of advertisers for poor quality landing pages, take a hint from Google about enforcing better quality landing pages. 4 - overall lead quality - the fault of Yahoo for poor ad targeting The only valid reason for termination is number 2. The others are failings by Yahoo, not the publisher. I think they are quite stupid and maybe can't be successful with the program. It will be interesting to see if the program continues after beta.
Sorry to hear that geomark. Every month before payment, YPN starts terminating publishers. CAn I ask how much you earned each month from YPN? And what types of sites you ran YPN?
probably a myspace related site poor traffic quality seems like yahoo's version of the invalid click-it can mean anything yahoo wants it to be without having to divulge any specifics.
It says you were terminated for "poor traffic quality" is that not due to poor CTR from your websites??? Or perhaps you are not sending enough traffic for them to merit to pay to manage your account???. I can see if a publisher is an expense as opposed to an asset...they could be dropped....makes pure business sense.
Yahoo Advertisers have landing pages with yahoo based converison trackers. Poor traffic quality would yield non existant or very low conversions for the advertiser. It has nothign to do with CTR or not sending enough traffic. Yahoo can also determine how long a visitor stays on a site and the referring URL as well.
No thats wrong...they have the option to use Yahoos Conversion Tracking code or they can use Google Adwords Cross Channel Tracking or any 3rd party ad tracking software or anything they program themselves or nothing at all. Analytics is the advertisers choice, not Yahoo's Peace
The last few months I was earning about $1200. One site, sort of an entertainment niche/celebrity site, sort of. Traffic mostly from search engines and bookmarks, no Myspace traffic, a little under 2,000 uniques per day. CTR was a little less than 2%. RPC used to be ok, a little less than $0.30 per click. RPC went to half that on Sep 12 and never recovered. The upside is no more wondering if I should put YPN or AdSense on new pages. It's AdSense all the way now.
unfortunately, that was the problem.....2% CTR for YPN on an entertainment site is on the high end...and that is due to the international traffic. I would approximate around 50% of your clicks are from international visitors....which apparently is a red flag at Y! headquarters. If you want to ride the Y! gravy train then you need to follow their rules...regardless of how outrageous they may be.
My understanding is that YPN doesn't ban for suspicious clicks: if a click is suspicious, you simply don't get paid for it. That's what was communicated to me when I first joined up and was worried about getting banned due to competitors clicking the ads on my pages.
2% CTR may be high for YPN, due to their poor targeting, but it isn't high for AdSense on the same site which is normally above 4%. So again, back the Yahoo's failing. You would estimate 50% of my clicks are from international visitors, and why would that be? About 15% of my traffic is international, and YPN serves ads only in English, so those international visitors, many of whom may not read English well or at all, just click on the ads anyway? It is more logical that less than 15% of the clicks are from international visitors, which was obviously still to high for YPN. And again back to YPN's failing - they should do the programming on the backend to automatically remove those clicks and not bother anyone about it.
I would contact Yahoo and ask how the quality of your traffic could be increased. If they tell you that you had too much international traffic sue a geoIP database, they do have free databases on teh web, and even step by step tutorials on how to set it up. If they say that CTR was suspicious tell them that you don't click your ads and don't encourage others to click your ads, if a competitor clicks your ads it is beyond your control. Just basically get the reason out of them on why you were banned if possible, if they use vague terminology then act stupid and ask what that means. After they tell you the reason emphasize that you will correct the problem and ask for your account back. I have read many stories on how Yahoo listens to publishers even after being banned and on most cases if you try to get back in they will let you in if you correct the problem.
I was under the impression that Yahoo now just filters out international traffic. Am I not correct in stating this?
All three search engines use Geo Targeting I believe. It is a lot easier to not display ads outside certain IPs, than to try and validate countless clicks. A few lines of codes saves hours of work..... Google Msn & Yahoo to some extent also allow advertisers to decide geographically where ads are displayed. Hope this helps Peace
I don't know yet. I read elsewhere they jack you around for 60 to 90 days before a final payout. Other posters say they are still waiting for their final check.
Actually, now that YPN's RPC dropped so much AdSense pays better. I get around $0.10 per click with AdSense and double the CTR of YPN. Previously YPN had the advantage, low CTR but much higher RPC. Moot point for me now. Gotta change all my legacy html pages back to AdSense - a lot of work.
This is good advice, and I would be inclined to follow it, except that YPN's RPC dropped so much that I am better off to drop them completely and replace them with AdSense. If they ever get back to higher RPC, and ever improve their targeting, then I'll be sad that I am no longer with them. But those are two very big if's.