Yahoo Search Advertising is a FRAUD

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.