I’ve been monitoring the methods affiliates are using to promote ringtones, and came across an interesting example when searching for various terms on Yahoo.
In this instance, an affiliate is using the verboten word, free, to promote ringtone offers that are not free. When I searched for free realtone, one of the paid ads through Yahoo! Search Marketing was for BestRingtonesOffer.com.
This ad had the title, “Free Ringtone Sent to Phone Ringtones”, and the description, “Download free ringtone sent to phone Ringtones. Get Them Now.”
I created a brief video to show the flow of this offer. While the affiliate is using the word free in their ad, the page where users are taken when clicking the ad makes no reference to “free.”
I clicked on Cingular on the landing page, and this brought me to a page to enter my cell phone number. This page, which reads “Designed and Marketed by AzoogleAds” in the footer, has a notice that conflicts with the original ad – it says, “With the Blinko Club – $9.99/Month.”
Am I the only one that sees a problem here? I’ve got to wonder how long it will be before the affiliates, advertisers, and networks involved hear from the government on this issue.
Update
I heard from the affiliate that owns BestRingtonesOffer.com, and he informed me that the Yahoo! Search Marketing editorial folks will sometimes change titles and descriptions to reflect what they believe is accurate. In this case, the changes did not coincide with the affiliate’s intentions. According to the affiliate, they bid on the keyword “Free Realtone” with copy that had no mention of “Free,” which they stated was compliant. However, since the keyword contained “Free,” Yahoo! Search Marketing editorial decided to change the copy without notifying the affiliate. As a result, all keywords associated with that ad group received this revised title and description. The affiliate said when they were made aware, they immediately paused the entire campaign and AzoogleAds.com broke the links associated with the offending content.
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I’ve had Yahoo change copies on me several times in the past, sometimes causing me serious headaches. They have switched up terms in tested copy seemingly randomly to synonyms of terms. It looks like they did it to make the ad fit without line-wrapping for ranks 1-3. Once they did a find an replace on ampersands and broke many of my URLs when they replaced ampersands (&) with the text “and”!
To see them modify ads just use an exclamation point in your copy. They will change this to a period without notifying you.
Ive had yahoo change a few ads on me before. I was bidding on a competitors product, but used my product name in the title trying to get some of his traffic. when i checked the ad a few days later it had been approved, but they switched the title to my competitors product…I assume because they looked at the keywords I was bidding on in that group. im glad the keywords went live, but they need some sort of email alert system to let people know the editors changed something.
He probably was being lazy and dumped a bunch of keywords into a campaign and used a dynamic ad. I’ve done it before. I highly doubt yahoo would change your ad. If they don’t like it, they just won’t approve it. That is a pretty creative excuse though.
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