Yesterday, Yahoo! Search Marketing announced the launch of their brand new Traffic Quality Center. The idea sounds good in theory, however…
It seems the good folks at Yahoo! Search Marketing (afterwards referred to as YSM) have other issues that are at least equally as important as battling click fraud. The number one issue that comes to my mind I’ll call traffic quality.
A little story to illustrate my point. Some company/person purchases a cheap Ad on Google Adwords for “blue widgets” (everyone seems to love the term “widgets” when giving examples). The landing page for that Ad is then filled with higher-paying Ads from another Pay Per Click provider, say YSM. These (usually) low-quality clicks end up costing advertisers, such as myself and my company, a fair amount of money.
YSM really needs to take a hard look at who they allow in their partner network. I’m not talking about the content network (Yahoo Publisher Network I believe it is called), but their regular network of search partners. There is not, at this time, any way to opt out of having certain web sites display your ads. You either drop YSM all together and lose one of the biggest sites on the net, or you deal with these frustrating clicks.
To be fair, Google is also partly to blame for this predicament. Part of their advertising program (Google Adwords) is based on the quality of their advertisers’ sites. Now, it would stand to reason that a site that is simply practicing PPC arbitrage would be rather low quality, but that’s just my opinion.
So please, Google and Yahoo, clean up your PPC partner programs. It will make your honest, quality advertisers much happier.