So I was doing a search for windows based hosting on Yahoo today and got to looking at some of the ads that were running on the side. One that stuck out to me was an ad for Yahoo hosting when searching for "asp.net hosting". I know Yahoo has been doing hosting for a while now, but I didn't think they were doing windows hosting. So like any curious soul, I clicked on the ad and started to dive into Yahoo's hosting offering to see what they offered. After searching around the specs for the hosting service I found that Yahoo only offers unix based hosting, no windows. Yahoo makes such a big deal about an advertiser's keywords and ads being relevant to the product offering but yet when it comes to selling Yahoo's own services, relevancy doesn't matter I guess.
Got me there. I can't 100% confirm it's Yahoo directly, however I can make a 99% call on it. Yahoo uses commission junction for it's affiliate program. So for this to be an affiliate tracked sale there would need to be something, either a cookie or a back end item tracking the sale, which I don't see. However I do see when taken to the landing environment tracking denoting the key word used as well as the fact that the click came from YSM and that it was a PPC, all things that it would not be tracked if it was routed through commission junction first. Being a person who has run affiliate programs through CJ and Linkshare, the best data you get is who referred your site, not how it was referred. So the capturing of this data would be only if Yahoo was doing it directly. Plus let's look at if an affiliate was running these ads, wouldn't you as Yahoo be more careful to watch for your own affiliates braking your own rules as to NOT appear like you have a double standard when it comes to your advertising network policies. It just comes of as a "Do as I say, not as I do" situation either way, it if was by an affiliate or not. As for it being old news, I apologize if it is, but shouldn't we be a little upset that this has been a known issue then and Yahoo still is allowed to do this?
Yahoo like Google makes the rules, there is nothing stating that they have to follow them. It is part of life, the more powerful you are the more rules you can make and the less rules you have to follow.