Marketing analytics firm reports steep drop in Yahoo click costs.
According to marketing analytics company Covario, Yahoo’s cost-per-click prices were down 29% after instituting widespread variable click pricing in September. Although it’s unclear what universe of click data Covario used to calculate this, Yahoo is happily quoting it. Covario says the typical CPA is down 11% since the change.
Although initial estimates among parking companies were that parking click revenue would decline anywhere from 2% to about 12% following the change, individual publishers are seeing wide variances as their traffic quality scores change.
A bigger drop may be in store once Yahoo implements its new “premium” channel segmentation as part of a lawsuit settlement.
But there are a couple bright spots in the news. First, if CPAs are falling as Covario suggests, advertisers might start moving back to Yahoo and push CPC rates back up. Second, Covario reports that click through rates were up 46% after making the change (a correlation that doesn’t make immediate sense to me).
Mansour says
I don’t believe that Yahoo’s search provides the best result for the search in ascending order. Maybe if they stop charging $300 plus for a website to be included, people will trust their genuineness. On Google the search result is purely according to relevance of the keywords searched for, and that is the big difference.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Mansour – that’s Yahoo Directory, not Yahoo Search.
Mansour says
Andrew,
Yahoo Direct and Yahoo search are both entwined. A few years back I stopped paying the annual $300 fee for my website Mydiscountdomains.com. The result was astonishing, and worth mentioning. While Google has Mydiscountdomains.com at the top of the search under the keywords discount domains, my discount domains, and many other over 119000 all of the searches connect directly to the website, on Yahoo when you search for MyDiscountDomains, you will never find any direct connection between the search results and my website. As a matter of fact when you put MyDiscountDomains in the search box, GoDaddy shows first, and you will not find my website on any of the search results. so there is no difference.
mansour
Domain Investor says
It would be interesting to know factual numbers for Google’s program.
Matt says
First off, we know Yahoo technology is not working correctly.
If there is a 29% reduction in CPCs, there should be a similar 29% reduction in CPA. Instead there is a 11% reduction in CPA. This would mean that certain clicks that are not being paid as much for are still converting as they were before the price reductions. In other words, fraud.
Secondly, Yahoo obviously has no brains to make a post like that. Whenever there’s a drop in CPCs ofcourse there is going to be a drop in CPA. If they’d reduce CPCs to 1 cent across the board the advertiser ROI would be through the roof.
This is a no brainer.
We know Yahoo is stupid.
Let’s just move on. The company is finished and we all know it. They have nothing.