What the fuck is going on with YPN?

[Setec]

Starting sometime on March 1st, my CTR for YPN arbitrage dropped by a factor of TEN, from about 50% to about 5%. This is happening equally across all of about 50 niches and 4 different PPC traffic sources with traffic that's 98.5% from the U.S.

It might make sense if my site was down, but it hasn't been. Also, YPN is recording the impressions, and Google Analytics is showing that the pages are loading too. I've been checking my site and it's showing the correct targeted ads, and the few clicks I do get are for the usual amounts.

This is completely outside the range of natural fluctuations. It just about has to be YPN cheating me out of clicks. They stopped recording almost all clicks in my URL channels on February 13th, so I wasn't able to manage niche-by-niche anymore... now they seem to be ignoring most of my clicks, period.

Please tell me I'm now the only one seeing this...

 

[aeiouy]

Probably because of the way things have changed with panama on the advertising side. I would have to think about it a bit, but with the way content matches are seperate now, and limited to one bid per group etc, I suspect people are paying a lot less for that traffic.

It is much easier to easily distinguish and understand what you are paying for the content side of things when setting up accounts now. Was not the case before, where people could easily set up an account and pay out the same ppc for search and content and not even know it. In fact that was the default behavior.

 

[Setec]

It can't be a Panama thing. I have seen some effects from that, a gradual drop of around 30-50% in revenue across most of my niches once Panama was out. That was annoying but at least there was an obvious explanation.

This was an instantaneous loss of 90% of my daily clicks, with no significant changes in my traffic or the ads being shown on my site. That's not Panama, it's something going very wrong.

 

[kdawg]

I've noticed about a 50% drop in my profits as well.... starting 3-4 days ago.

The impressions are about the same, and for me the clicks are about the same, but my CPC has halved.