Yahoo! Search Marketing

We Work to Protect You in a Variety of Ways

Behind the scenes
Click Protection System
Pricing Discounts

Your tools
Blocked Domains
Targeting
Blocked Continents
Click Filter Report
Ad Delivery Report

Our people
Dedicated Traffic Quality Team
Advertiser Traffic Quality Council

Click Protection System
Our proprietary Click Protection System is comprised of a complex series of filters that work 24 hours a day to identify click fraud and/or invalid clicks, clicks that we believe shouldn't be billed to our advertisers.

The Click Protection System tracks click and search patterns across many data points, including IP address, the time of the search, the time of the click, and user session information. In addition to this technology, we have an internal group of dedicated analysts who update the filters to address problematic new click patterns.

Pricing Discounts
Our systems evaluate the quality of our partners' traffic when you are charged for a click from that source and may discount your click charge accordingly. Traffic quality from our partner websites is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of their ability to deliver quality traffic. We began discounting clicks on certain groups of related keywords at the end of May in the U.S., and will continue to apply discounts more broadly.

There's nothing you need to do to take advantage of these pricing discounts. Discounts are applied automatically based on Yahoo!'s pricing technology.

Learn more about pricing discounts.

Blocked Domains
We understand that clicks from some partners may be more valuable to you than clicks from others. Yahoo! gives you more control over your campaigns by letting you specify partner websites or sections of a website that don't meet your business needs and on which you don't want your ads to appear.

As you know, with Sponsored Search your ads can appear in Yahoo! search results as well as search results throughout the Yahoo! distribution network. In addition, if you choose the Content Match option your ads can appear alongside content on Yahoo! or throughout the Yahoo! distribution network. Blocked Domains lets you specify sites on which you don't want your ads to appear, whether they're competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don't want associated with your brand.

Blocked Domains lets you block up to 500 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain.

For more information on when and how to use Blocked Domains click here.

Targeting
New: Targeting: We've enhanced your targeting capabilities allowing you to get more of the traffic that you like best.

With the goal of sending you even better-targeted traffic, we've released several features to help increase your account's overall performance. With a few clicks on your keyboard, you can now 1) target your ads to certain demographics; 2) set targeting preferences for when you would like your ads displayed that make the most sense for your business; and 3) further pinpoint who sees your ads using enhanced geo-targeting features.

Here's how:

Demographic Targeting
The idea behind demographic targeting is that by using bid adjustments, you can spend a greater percentage of your advertising budget on users who fit certain criteria. If, for example, you are selling a product geared toward women ages 18-34, you can add a premium to your bid for clicks coming from prospects matching those criteria.

Ad Scheduling
This feature, also known as "dayparting," allows you to schedule ads to display at different times and days throughout the week. You could, for example, only have your ad displayed during times when you have staff on hand to answer customer phone calls. Or you could elect to only display your ad during the business week, and not on the weekend, depending on what the needs of your business are.

Enhanced Geo Targeting
With this release, we have fine-tuned our geo-targeting capabilities. Now you can target users located within three or six miles of a specific zip code. And as with demographic targeting, you can add a premium to your bid to target users matching a selected geographic profile.

To learn how to set up Geo-targeting click here.

Blocked Continents
When you opened your U.S. account or upgraded to the new Sponsored Search platform, the Blocked Continents feature in your account defaulted to exclude traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is not important to your business, you may find that this capability helps improve your overall conversion rate.

If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, you can choose to change your continent blocking settings. Click here for instructions.

Click Filter Report
The Click Filter Report gives you greater transparency for click activity and filtering. It's part of our overall effort to protect our advertisers from receiving invalid clicks.

The new report will be available in your account interface and provide information on the number of clicks on your ads that our Click Protection System has identified as invalid, and, as a result, were not charged to you.

You can run the report for your entire account or your individual campaign. You can customize the columns in your report to show data such as impressions, invalid clicks, invalid click rate, and average cost per click. If you have multiple accounts, the report can display data from all of your accounts simultaneously.

Ad Delivery Report
Our recently launched Ad Delivery Report lets you know where your ads are displayed, providing you with a list of the domains in the Yahoo! Partner Network that send traffic to your website.

In addition to providing visibility into the domains within our network, the Ad Delivery Report can help you decide which domains to block using our Domain Blocking Feature. If you are using either Conversion-Only Analytics or Full Analytics, the report can show you how domains perform according to metrics such as conversions, click-through rate (CTR), or revenue on ad search (ROAS).

ADR FAQs

Can you provide historical performance data for these partners (prior to launch of the Ad Delivery Report)?

We are unable to provide performance data on partners (or domains or URLs) on dates prior to the launch date of the Ad Delivery Report.

Does the Ad Delivery Report show billable clicks only? Where are the invalid clicks coming from?

The Ad Delivery Report displays only the valid clicks for which you are charged. Our Click Protection System uses a variety of techniques to filter clicks before they show up as a charge on your reports. This software is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and as a result, you may receive clicks for which you are not billed.

Why is this information filtered by keyword/ad/ad group/campaign?

We designed the Ad Delivery Report to be consistent with our domain blocking feature, which allows advertisers to block domains at the account level.

Why isn’t there an automated way to add these URLs to my blocked domains list?

Because the decision to block an entire domain or specific directories or sub-domains can impact the number of potential users to whom your ad is shown, we believe it is best to review the source that you are going to block and make a conscious decision in doing so.

What do you classify as "Unknown" traffic?

In a small number of cases, we are unable to reliably identify the page on which an ad impression was displayed. When this occurs, we tag the traffic as belonging to an “unknown” source. Please note that we work with our partners to spot and rectify such instances, when feasible.

Can I still use the Ad Delivery Report if I’m using a third-party analytics package?

Yes, you can still use the report to help you manage your account. Please note that data on your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) will only be displayed in the report if you are using the Conversion Only or Full Analytics tools in your account.

Why don’t the clicks I’m seeing in my weblogs match what you’re showing in the Ad Delivery Report?

There are a number of reasons why the number of clicks you see in your independent tracking may be different from the number reported by Yahoo! Search Marketing.

1) We process each click on an ad before redirecting it to your server, so one potential source of discrepancy is if your site (or Web counter) is down or unavailable.

2) Another possibility is that your page may already have been retrieved by what is known as a "caching proxy server." A caching proxy server is a computer on the Internet that intermediates Web page requests. These servers "remember" (cache) recent pages they have already served to other users. A subsequent request for a recently served page can be served from this cache, rather than going to your site and asking your site to serve the page. This means that your Web logs will not show the user's click or the page request.

If you'd like to make sure your Web logs record all of your clicks, you can add a "no-cache" directive to your HTML pages in the <HEAD> section of your HTML code. Below, we've provided a no-cache directive that you can use:

Here's an example of how the HTML code appears once the no-cache directive has been added:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<TITLE>Demo cache page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<H2>Hello</H2>
</BODY>
</HTML>

The no-cache directive provided above instructs caching proxy servers to not remember a particular page. This will cause the caching proxy server to make a request of your site each time a user clicks through, so that your Web logs will have an opportunity to record the click.

Dedicated Traffic Quality Team
Yahoo! is committed to constantly improving the quality of traffic we provide to our advertisers, and part of that commitment is to have the right people in place. This includes a dedicated team that drives all of our Traffic Quality initiatives. Some of those initiatives include combating click fraud, enhancing traffic quality, and delivery of products and services that create more transparency and control for advertisers. The team is also charged with enhancing our dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality-related matters.

Advertiser Traffic Quality Council
An Advertiser Traffic Quality Council has been assembled to represent the interests of all advertisers regarding traffic quality. These selected advertisers will travel to Yahoo! Search Marketing's headquarters to meet with the Network Quality teams and provide feedback on how we can continue to enhance our approach to network quality.