I’ve been meaning to follow up on my first post, and wouldn’t you know it, Yahoo gave me another reason to write something up again. But before I go into this new issue, let’s recap.
Yahoo’s automatic payment plan went a little overboard when a day’s worth of click charges went way over the daily limit by about $600. For those of you keeping score, since Yahoo’s automatic payment plan likes to keep at least three times the average spend for the account on hand, that means my client’s card got whacked for about $1800.
Now for the follow up - Yahoo has credited back the majority of the $1800. The amount remaining is the amount I requested stay put (hey, I still have to keep this thing running, right?) They also credited me back for the majority of the $600 in click charges that got this whole thing started in the first place. After doing a little more research using Clicktracks (a fantastic analysis package) I found the average time on site for this traffic was well below average (though still higher then I thought, probably due to one or two legitimate visitors bumping the average up). So I’m pretty sure it was clickfraud. Good thing Yahoo acted accordingly.
The problem now is that it’s happening again. This time to three other accounts recently transferred over from the old Local Sponsored Search program, albeit for much smaller amounts of money. Yahoo seems to be reacting again after a phone call this afternoon, but considering I was sure to set daily spending limits first, I wish Yahoo would just get it right before it was a problem.
Oh and a quick shout out (do bloggers shout out?) to my buddy Dan, who’ll be managing a non-profit PPC account for a friend of his. Not sure why he didn’t ask for my help seeing as how I’m the PPC guy. I know I’d sure as hell like $1000 a day to play with on a PPC account…
I’d recently requested Yahoo transfer a PPC account over from the old Local Sponsored Search program into the new Panama system. Having already uploaded the campaign using their third party conversion tool (one of the better features implemented in Panama), I set about getting the campaign up and running. I added a credit card to the account, added funds, turned off content match and advanced match, and turned on the daily budget feature, setting a $5 a day max.
Strangely enough, shortly after finishing, I started receiving multiple emails from Yahoo in regards to billing for this account. It alternated between an email saying the funds for the account had been depleted, and an email noting that the credit card associated with the account had been charged $50 in order to replenish those funds. These two emails were sent to me over and over again for a period of about an hour and a half and then stopped. Of course, there was no way to figure out what exactly was going on that day, as Yahoo’s tracking for paid search only goes as far as the end of the previous day. I assumed that it was some sort of glitch; Yahoo didn’t think it had notified me yet, so the automated email kept going out. To stay on the safe side, I sent a note to Yahoo via the support link in the account. I never got a response.
Imagine my suprise this afternoon when, within five minutes, I recieved no less than thirty eight emails from Yahoo saying it had wacked the credit card for $50. Alarmed I rang up Yahoo Search Marketing support and logged into the account. As the rep and I started talking I saw the balance stored in the account for click charges had swelled up to over $1900. The rep informed me that before I set the daily budget, yesterday over $600 in click charges had rang up in what she called a “sudden spike in activity” (read: click fraud, folks). You may or may not realize that Yahoo automatically charges your card until you have three times the amount of your average daily spend available for future click charges.
So that explained the repeated charges to the credit card. She broke down the spend for the day before for me as well:
Sponsored Search - $212.47/172 clicks/$1.23
Content Match - $415.93/215 clicks/$1.93
Wow. All in the less than five minutes it took me to turn off content match, and set the $5 daily budget. Word to the wise, set those things before you add funds to your accounts. The rep was actually very accommodating, and is putting things in motion to credit most of the charges back to the card. However, this isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with Yahoo and credit card charges. So keep your eye on your accounts; be careful with setting limits, and be extra careful with Yahoo content match.