I blogged a few weeks ago about my renewed interest in Yahoo Sponsored Search in my "Dear Yahoo" post. At the time, I thought that perhaps Yahoo was turning a corner in the online advertising sphere and might have finally figured it out. I have now, after spending $220 USD and one entire month advertising with them, realized how wrong I was.
Yahoo's online search ad placement system is horrible.
In fact, I suspect the majority of the site traffic generated by a Yahoo ad is actually fraud. Google Analytics is a powerful tool and I could teach a class on it at this point -- I've been using it since it was released and I have gone to seminars and taken classes. So, I spent a few hours focused on Yahoo traffic analysis. As it turns out, the "visitors" from Yahoo are (98%) fraud generated by Yahoo's content placement site. Probably ad-placement scammers buying ads from Yahoo and then using "pay to browse" or automated methods to fire the ads and collect my money.
I am getting a 1.05PPV (pages viewed per visit) traffic load from Yahoo traffic. That means that 94.55% of the visitors are viewing only the first page after the ad link and then closing the browser -- a sure sign of fraud from the source. All my legitimate traffic ( Google, TheKnot, WeddingChannel, CraigsList, Yahoo Organic Search) averages a bounce rate (immediate exit) of around 3.85 which is low, to be sure, but does not mean fraud. The bounce rate for my average traffic is only 22%.
In addition, Yahoo is reporting that I get about 10 visitors a day from their ads. I am finding about 10% of the traffic I am being billed for actually makes it to my site. I suspect part of this is that most of the scammers have found a way to trigger the ads in an automated fashion that does not actually request pages from my site -- they're just getting Yahoo to record the click and never even downloading pages from CoryTrese.com
Other key terms I might use to describe Yahoo Sponsored Search include "click fraud", "fraud", "deception", "sucks", "lies", "terrible", "illegal", "unfair", "deceptive business practices" and maybe some other words I won't use on my blog.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
Top 10 Security Vulnerabilities in .NET Configuration Files
Developers often concentrate on writing secure code but leave security vulnerabilities in application configuration files. Discover the most common configuration security problems—and how to avoid them.
by Bryan SullivanTop 10 Security Vulnerabilities in .NET Configuration Files
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