CTR issues?

That's too bad. Did they give you any sort of warning or have contact with you prior to termination?

Are your sites geared towards a younger group (teenagers) or were you using paid traffic?

 

thats kind of interesting. not that its the same old reason. but usually they do these terminations in batches and i thought we were safe until next month. what i find interesting is the total decline you were facing up to termination. it makes me wonder if that in itself is some kind of warning.

im not going to ask your niche / traffic sources but were you using ad targetting? how do you feel about your traffic quality? i have always suspected that ad targetting system is a dangerous mechanism that gives them more feedback to advertiser conversions then the random contextual targetting engine. just a thought of course but i've stayed far far away from ad targetting because of this.

 

I have a teen related site. I targeted clothing, electronics, music, movies, you know - kid stuff. I got a fairly good amount of clicks. I also geo-targated.

To be honest, I am a little ticked; obviously, but I knew it was coming. YPN sucks big time, their targeting is horrible, there cp is just as bad. I also think they are liars and cheat people out of their money.

The limiting of clicks was very unprofessional. Definetly not something other publishers like to hear about a program they are thinking of joining.

Anyway, that's my story.

 

Ouch...Sorry about that

How long have you been with YPN?

I suspect Yahoo reviews sites before banning them. First an advertiser complains that site xyz.com is sending poor traffic. Yahoo looks at it and may put the site on a probation. If there are more complaints it finally gets terminated (to please advertisers). This process could take a couple months. I read here that myspacesupport.com which used to run Yahoo ads was terminated after a long review process. It too was making over 1K a day.

forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=1667844&postcount=22

Also, what kind of ad format were you using? The rectangles? Scrapers?

 

I have been with YPN for around a year. But I just started using it more recently around the begining of August.

I was using rectangles.

I am not going to other complaining about yahoo and how bad their system is, I am carrying on.

 

Yahoo is having a hard time keeping advertisers in their content match program (what YPN publishers run). Their ad revenue is way down, so I think they are probably getting a little too aggressive in an effort to keep advertisers. YPN pays more in many sectors because the advertisers are paying a lot more than with adsense. Google had the same problem yahoo is experiencing and solved it by going to different pricing for ads running on Google Search vs. Adsense. Yahoo is either going to go to separate pricing (mean YPN publishers are going to get paid less) or they will need to much more selective on which sites run YPN - which is what they are currently trying to do. I think in the end, they will be forced to change their pricing structure and payouts will drop to YPN publishers (even more than they have already) and result in payouts very similar to adsense. Adsense is already paying more in some sectors because they have many more advertisers.

I read that starting this month, they are no longer going to be making all overture bids public, so perhaps other changes are around the corner.

 

It's not the quality of the publishers sites. It's there system. They do not target ads. There CP is poor, they also have very poor publisher relations. They have lost alot of money due to poor management. Googles ad program is way above YPN in every aspect except payouts. I was targeting things related to my niche and they still terminated me. It's very hard to understand the way they work or the way they decide who is in or who isn't. Anyway, it was nice while it lasted. I am moving away from being reliant on PPC. CPA and direct is the only way to go.

 

Well, I disagree. The quality of a site is a huge issue. There are sites that are gaming sites that are running higher paying medical ads. A gaming site is not going to produce nearly the same as a site that is targeted for the advertisers medical niche. There are crappy sites that get clicks because visitors an ad as an exit. It's a fact that searches done on "Yahoo Search" vs YPN publishers site convert much better. It's exactly the same with google, which is why google went to a separate pricing system for adsense sites.

I spend a lot of money on adwords for an etailing site and won't touch any adsense site. I've tried. The conversion rate is horrible, even though a click costs much less (even 10% of google search). Most adword professionals won't touch advertising on content search (adsense sites). There is also click fraud to deal with when you are dealing with publisher owned sites.

Right now, if you want to run ads on YPN, you have to pay the same as you would on "Yahoo Search". That isn't going to work in the long run. Google tried it and failed. YPN is trying to do something different by building a higher quality network. I don't think it is going to work. They will have to weed out non-converting or "poor quality traffic sites". Google just reduced the cost to the advertiser - and they still have advertisers who won't touch adsense.

Yahoo doesn't want to not count clicks - they make nothing when they don't credit a YPN publisher. Every time they don't pay a publisher, they can't charge the advertiser. They are trying to keep advertisers from leaving by trying to filter out sites that don't produce the same as other sites.

YPN's targeting is poor - but half the problem is that they don't have the inventory to serve the correct ad - especially when filter out ads with their "stop words" program. Their algorithm is so poor that if it finds certain words on a page, it reverts to RON ads. You can say something like "their is low risk to having this procedure" and yahoo's algorithm picks up on the word "risk" and won't serve relevant ads. I had sixty sites running YPN and all but one was able to get relevant ads - but you had to work on ad position and page titles to do it (something I never had to do with google).

If yahoo wasn't having problems keeping advertisers at the prices they are charging, they wouldn't be so concerned with terminating publishers for "low quality traffic". They aren't going to be successful by terminating publishers who aren't involved with fraud. Adsense doesn't do it, they just charge the advertiser less.

But you're right, if it wasn't for the payout, they would only have publishers who were kicked out of adsense.

 

I've looked at this issue every single way possible and the only thing I can figure is that they are recording only a fraction of the clicks my site is actually generating. I have 99.x% US traffic on any given day. I have tested back and forth with AS and the impressions are always about the same. But, CTR on YPN pages is 1-2% of what AS records. And, I have pretty much the same advertisers showing up on both networks. I think it is an issue of ethics.

 

i highly doubt they are purposely cheating publishers out of clicks (charging advertisers and not crediting publishers). i am more inclined to believe that their geofiltering engine is innacurate (or not functioning properly) and therefore not counting all clicks as valid and / or that there are other factors which invalidate a seamingly valid click that we are not aware of.

also, you cant compare ypn and adsense, even in the case where the same advertisers show up on both networks. from ad layouts, to titles, descriptions, font types and sizes, there are subtle differences and i doubt that 3 out of 3 or 4 out of 4 advertiser slots are exactly the same between adsense and ypn. especially considering that ypn repeats advertisers in multiple ad blocks where adsense does not. also, i have seen issues where when i look at my page i can refresh 10 times and see the same set of advertisers appearing. looking at my stats for that same time period and page, i see clicks for other advertisers on that page that i had not seen when i looked. in essense, what you see is not necessarily what everyone else is going to see when they visit your page.

however, i have said it so many times that im boring myself... ypn is not paying for all US clicks and this is affecting my performance. there is something somewhere that determines that a valid US click is not valid for some reason. it would be nice if ypn would let us know more details on what invalidates a click so that we, or more accurately I, could execute a more proactive plan in dealing with these "invalid" clicks. i have tested many ideas, some have worked, some have not. as with everything ypn, its all consistently inconsistent.

jmo

 

Bottom line is I was averaging over $1500 per day targeting relevent catagories, 5 days ago only 25% of my clicks were being counted. We keep our own stats so we know.

Immedietly switched back to Adsense and awoke to reading that my account has been terminated for traffic quality.

YPN sucks in every aspect, except payout. At the rate their going they wont see 2008. I wouldn't shed a tear either. Adsense is such a nice system and we can only MSN content ads will be nice.