What domains to block in your Yahoo search marketing account
Yahoo recently added the ability for advertisers to block domains in their search marketing accounts. At first I wasn’t sure how to use this feature, but after some investigation and a cross reference with my analytics, I think that it will be a very effective tool to help eliminate bad traffic, if it’s related to a specific domain.
First thing you need to do to make sure you are using yahoo’s built-in analytics or configure your own analytics to report on all traffic from your yahoo campaigns and run a report by the domain that the traffic is coming from. You want to sort that report by the overall clicks from a particular domain.
Here’s an example of the report that you need (signifigantly reduced for readability).
Now if you look under the conversion column in this report, you will see that a few of these sites have provided no conversions.
These are the sites that you want to block from your PPC campaign. In this case the wealthygeek.com (3/1039 = .29%) is a conversion rate that I am not willing to pay for, so I’ll block it and others with poor converting traffic.
I would make sure that you have at least one month of traffic and PPC statistics, three months or more if you don’t get a lot of PPC traffic. Remove domains that tend to provide a lot of traffic but no conversions. If a site can’t provide a 1% conversion rate, it’s probably not worth keeping. Depending on your past history you may want to set your threshold above 1%.
Just remember that even if your PPC traffic goes down a bit, your overall cost is going to go down with it, and your overall conversion rate is going to go up.
Warning: If your ads attract poor visitors, it wont matter what website they’re on, so don’t use this method to optimize your account if you aren’t getting sales. This tool is useful only to remove sites that just send bad traffic. You should always be testing new key phrases, and new ads, and eliminating the ones that can’t provide cost effective traffic.
Yahoo also has a Q&A post as there have been a ton of question since this feature was launched.
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I always suspected there had to be some way you could eliminate your bogus traffic off of yahoo. When ever for some ads I was position 4 I was converting like crazy then when I went to the 3rd or 2nd spot conversions dropped big time. Theory was the higher you are up the more you put for alot of traffic sadly on some poor traffic search engines. By poor im talking about the quality. This post is awesome thank you so much for the info.
Does anyone have a list of junk domains that should be blocked? I’m envisioning a maintained list of obviously-junk domains that we could subscribe to.
I would like a list of junk domains. Can someone please provide the ones we should block. Thanks.
Do you have to own the domain for this to work or can you use your affiliate programs websites like clickbanks?
Anybody else noticing dropped conversions in yahoo. Its as if the traffic is getting worse and worse.