The AWS Blog

While the WSJ announced today that interactive advertisers are falling victim to internet advertising fraud in which they’re paying for impressions that don’t actually happen, those of us in the search marketing space are fighting our own battle.

I’ve written before about the inability of advertisers to control what websites their advertisements are displayed on when using the Yahoo Search Marketing platform. In this post I’ll substantiate it with some real-life examples of websites that are part of Yahoo’s “network.”

Why would Yahoo restrict advertisers in this way?

The answer is simple: inventory.

Yahoo can artificially inflate the number of impressions and clicks that they deliver (and charge advertisers for) by displaying advertisers’ ads on sites like this:

It’s true that Yahoo Search Marketing allows advertisers to manually enter domains that they explicitly don’t want their ads to appear on, but attempting to find every website that your ad appears on, and entering into Yahoo’s interface would take years (not to mention they restrict the number of sites you can list).

So how does this affect the performance of an online advertising campaign? For one of our clients, traffic from Yahoo search converts at 44% (44 out of every 100 website visitors buys/converts). Traffic from Yahoo’s “network” converts at 16%.

In this example, this means that if we chose to advertise on Yahoo (something that’s becoming increasingly harder to justify), 64% of our money is spent buying quality traffic, and the remaining 36% is wasted because Yahoo chooses to display our ads on arbitrage websites like the ones displayed above.

Why not just let advertisers disable the “network” and buy quality search traffic?