The easiest way to explain my ‘test’ is to let you read the following email I just sent to Yahoo Marketing Solutions customer support:
My account was turned off for a while, since 11/12/08, I don’t know why. I restarted it last week by manually drawing money from my credit card.
When it was restarted, ‘content-match’ was enabled, although I never used it before. The ‘bid’ was set at $5.15. The result is 1,191,689 impressions and 213 clicks, resulting in $281.01 in charges in one week. (Sponsored search was much more reasonable $25.58.)
I have turned off content-match, but am concerned about these charges. While we can debate the problems with my account, I also want to point out that the content-match ‘bidding’ screen showed that monthly estimates for my campaign would be: Impressions: 628,800 – 1,257,600, Clicks: 180 – 660. I have hit this in only one week. I am concerned that this amount of activity may have been fraudulent.
To recap, three things went wrong:
My account was disabled for unknown reasons
When reactivated, content-match was turned on without my knowledge
Traffic and clicks for content-match were excessive based on Yahoo’s estimates.Also, please look at the attached stats from Yahoo to my site: 93% bounce rate, and average time on site of 12 seconds. Those clicks were worthless, which is why I’ve kept content-match off for almost ten years.
If you can shed any light on the causes of this, I’d be interested to know. I’d also like to see the $281 refunded.
Thank you for taking a look at this and understanding my situation.
Okay, that sucked! I could have guessed that, but now I’ve proved the obvious.