Is Yahoo! Profile Your Ads?

Writing by Pay Per Click Journal on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Comments Off

PPC Hero is reporting a new practice at Yahoo! that could seriously affect your PPC account there. The practice is called Ad Profiling.

Evidently, what Yahoo! is doing now is taking low-performing keywords and revising the ads without account holders’ permission. If this is really taking place then Yahoo! is treading into dangerous territory. I can envision a Yahoo! account representative making undisclosed changes to a user’s ad that lead to higher click throughs, which in turn lead to unexpected depletion of budgets long before expected. Can you smell a lawsuit from that?

Another danger to this practice is that these “improvements” may not be improvements at all. What if an account representative at Yahoo! makes changes to an ad that lead clickers to believe they are landing on a page to see a product for X but don’t find X at all? This would lead to an advertiser paying for clicks that he would not have wanted to pay for and could result in another lawsuit.

I understand Yahoo!s desire to be more competitive and to increase its shareholders’ revenue. I fully support those initiatives, but this ad profiling seems like a dangerous practice that could land Yahoo! in hot water. Be careful out there.

Comments Off                      Category: Yahoo! Search Marketing                      

Read similar posts in Yahoo! Search Marketing

• Why You SHOULD Put Your Phone Number In Your PPC Ads
• Should You Use Yahoo!s Ad Optimization Feature?
• 3 New Yahoo! Search Marketing Features That Should Have Happened Long Ago
• Yahoo! Tries To Help With Keywords
• Yahoo! Is Making An End Run To Acquire More Market Share

Subscribe to our RSS feed