Hops vs. clicks. Wierd results from Tracking 202, Yahoo, and Clickbank

There are many reasons that you might be showing more hops than actual clicks in yahoo. Like TE2 said if you have a website then you may be getting organinc traffic or also some of the people might actually be clicking on the offer multiple times.

However, since you say your using Yahoo PPC I think I might have the answer to your problem.

You see yahoo's search advertising is notoriously horrible for placeing your ad on unrelevant parked domains that can produce tremendous amounts of low quality traffic. (at least that's been my experience on almost every campaign I have ever run with them)

But they are getting better at blocking this low quality traffic and if you actually go to the reports section od your yahoo search marketing account you'll see a link towards the bottom of the left hand sidebar that says "Click Filter"

Set your date range and see if the amount of invalid clicks makes things more equal to the amount of hops clickbank is showing.

John

P.S. I have personally found that with yahoo you need to make sure you are tracking where you clicks are coming from so that you can use yahoo's "block domains" feature to filter out any unwanted traffic. If you aren't already tracking to the keyword level and more than I would suggest using tracking 202 or prosper 202. They're both free!

I'm not talking about the content network.

That's the thing about yahoo. when you run your ads on the yahoo search network they still show up on alot of junk pages that are in their so-called "search partners network"

If you are familiar with Google Adwords at all then you'll know that when you run your ads on their search network you have the option to display your ads on Google searches only and/or relevant search partners that have placed a google search bar on their site.

Yahoo has basically the same kind of thing going on except their search partners network is total junk in my opinion and there is no way to turn it off like you can in Google. The only thing you can do is watch where your clicks are coming from and block the domains that are low quality.

Just check the "referring sites" states in your 202 account and you'll see what I mean. It'll probably show something like half your clicks came from yahoo.com and the rest from totally junk sites.


This is also a probability although not likely since there is such a large difference.


John

No problem buddy!

Yeah, there's money to be had on yahoo but you have to work a little harder at maintaining things as their system is light years behind Google.

It also sucks that you can only block up to 500 domains. I have multiple accounts with yahoo just because It's so easy to hit that limit with all the garbage in their search partners network.

Just keep watching those referring sites stats and block them as they come in.

John