Yahoo! Search Marketing

We Work to Protect You in a Variety of Ways

Our systems
Click Protection System
Pricing Discounts
Blocked Domains
Blocked Continents
Click Filter Report

Our people
Dedicated Traffic Quality Team
Advertiser Traffic Quality Council

Click Protection System
Our proprietary Click Protection System is comprised of a complex series of filters that work 24 hours a day to identify click fraud and/or invalid clicks, clicks that we believe shouldn't be billed to our advertisers.

The Click Protection System tracks click and search patterns across many data points, including IP address, the time of the search, the time of the click, and user session information. In addition to this technology, we have an internal group of dedicated analysts who update the filters to address problematic new click patterns.

Pricing Discounts
Our systems evaluate the quality of our partners' traffic when you are charged for a click from that source and may discount your click charge accordingly. Traffic quality from our partner websites is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of their ability to deliver quality traffic. We began discounting clicks on certain groups of related keywords at the end of May in the U.S., and will continue to apply discounts more broadly.

There's nothing you need to do to take advantage of these pricing discounts. Discounts are applied automatically based on Yahoo!'s pricing technology.

Learn more about pricing discounts.

Blocked Domains
We understand that clicks from some partners may be more valuable to you than clicks from others. Yahoo! gives you more control over your campaigns by letting you specify partner websites or sections of a website that don't meet your business needs and on which you don't want your ads to appear.

As you know, with Sponsored Search your ads can appear in Yahoo! search results as well as search results throughout the Yahoo! distribution network. In addition, if you choose the Content Match option your ads can appear alongside content on Yahoo! or throughout the Yahoo! distribution network. Blocked Domains lets you specify sites on which you don't want your ads to appear, whether they're competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don't want associated with your brand.

Blocked Domains lets you block up to 250 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain.

Blocked Continents
When you opened your U.S. account or upgraded to the new Sponsored Search platform, the Blocked Continents feature in your account defaulted to exclude traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is not important to your business, you may find that this capability helps improve your overall conversion rate.

If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, you can choose to change your continent blocking settings. Click here for instructions.

Click Filter Report
The Click Filter Report gives you greater transparency for click activity and filtering. It's part of our overall effort to protect our advertisers from receiving invalid clicks.

The new report will be available in your account interface and provide information on the number of clicks on your ads that our Click Protection System has identified as invalid, and, as a result, were not charged to you.

You can run the report for your entire account or your individual campaign. You can customize the columns in your report to show data such as impressions, invalid clicks, invalid click rate, and average cost per click. If you have multiple accounts, the report can display data from all of your accounts simultaneously.

Dedicated Traffic Quality Team
Yahoo! is committed to constantly improving the quality of traffic we provide to our advertisers, and part of that commitment is to have the right people in place. This includes a dedicated team that drives all of our Traffic Quality initiatives. Some of those initiatives include combating click fraud, enhancing traffic quality, and delivery of products and services that create more transparency and control for advertisers. The team is also charged with enhancing our dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality-related matters.

Advertiser Traffic Quality Council
An Advertiser Traffic Quality Council has been assembled to represent the interests of all advertisers regarding traffic quality. These selected advertisers will travel to Yahoo! Search Marketing's headquarters to meet with the Network Quality teams and provide feedback on how we can continue to enhance our approach to network quality.