We’ve mentioned before that you can’t have the “set it and forget it” attitude when it comes to managing PPC accounts. While reviewing my Yahoo! account a few weeks ago, I noticed that we had generated a ton of extra clicks and spend with zero conversions via the content network, which was completely out of the norm. At the time, I went ahead and paused the content network in that one particular ad group. However, the next day I saw the same thing in two more ad groups in the same account.
I remembered that recently Yahoo! announced an improvement to their content network. “Content match now combines a better understanding of web page and ad content with insights from users’ geographic and behavioral profiles, says Yahoo!” Despite their so called “improvement”, I emailed my Yahoo representative immediately to ask what was going on with my account. Just yesterday, I got an email from him stating that the ‘click activity investigation’ was complete and they would be refunding my account $1300.00 for ‘invalid clicks’.
This just goes to show you MUST keep an eye on your accounts at all times for crazy things like this. And it never hurts to ask your reps what’s going on if you see something abnormal. My recommendation, if you’re running PPC in Yahoo, check your content network stats for the past few weeks, if you see an increase in clicks and spend with no conversions I would ask Yahoo to investigate your account as well.
