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Could this be a big merger brewing…. Is it true will Microsoft buy out yahoo. Well the rumors are floating and are indicating that just may happen. Not a complete buyout but Microsoft would become a big enough holder of their stock to possibly merge or take what is working for Yahoo and apply it to MSN search and vice versa…. Here is a quote from Money.cnn. com http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/03/technology/microsoft_yahoo/index.htm

Members of the company’s top management are considering a deal despite Microsoft’s history of winning over major technology markets - think Web browsers - on its own, The Wall Street Journal said. Microsoft has tried to compete in the burgeoning online search and Web advertising categories on its own but made little progress as Google has made massive gains as the industry leader, according to the story.

Microsoft executives hope that Yahoo’s strength in search and advertising categories would give the company a stronger foothold on the Web, the report said. So far, millions of dollars invested in search-engine technology and online ad systems have yielded little in the way of revenue or market share for the company, according to the Journal. 

What could this mean for affiliates / advertisers… Well the only bad part is neither of them have a good system for Quick approval as with Yahoo your keywords that may have trademark or possible adult tags may sit for days before approved or declined (usually the later)… and MSN still needs to improve on their turn around time for approval. The one good thing is maybe Yahoo would allow you to import 10,000 keywords into on Campaign. This is some interesting news and I will be watching to see if MSN will buy the stake in Yahoo or not.  What are your thoughts?

You can read everywhere that people suggest you track you campaigns and statistics, even on this blog. Meaning not relying on Google, Yahoo, Msn or other networks to rely on them to send you just the country or target traffic you are paying for.  There are many programs out there that you can pay for that will track the IP’s of your visitors and be able to tag to a certain campaign, or you can have one built. I personally had one built for me as the ones out there worked but I couldn’t get the information I wanted or get it in the way I wanted it. Yes this cost me a decent penny to get this tracking program built, but it has paid for itself already several times over.
Take this example. I am running a campaign on yahoo search marketing and I was checking my program stats and noticed that I was seeing a lot of traffic from foreign countries and my whole account is set to US only.  So I dig thru my stats for Aug 1 thru 13 and find that anywhere from 10 to 25% is from foreign countries.  So I log into my Yahoo search marketing account and contact them letting them know what I am seeing and attach a report for just one of the days and state that I am seeing this on all days Aug 1 thru 13. A day later I get an email stating it has been escalated to their click fraud department and I should get an email in a few days. Two days later I get this email:

Our investigation concluded that your account experienced one or more occurrences of the following situations:

?        Unusual end user activity or behavior
?        System issues

As a result, we have issued an adjustment to your account in the amount of $X,XXX.XX. This adjustment should post to your account within three to four business days. You can view your billing history through the Reports section of your account by selecting the Billing Transaction Detail Report.

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with the specific details associated with the identified pattern of behavior. We want to assure you that we are always working to improve the quality of the traffic delivered to advertisers and as such we are taking the appropriate steps to help prevent these types of activity from occurring again in the future. Our sophisticated Click Protection System runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is designed to prevent advertisers from being charged for certain clicks. However, there may be instances, such as this one, where we make additional adjustments to your account.

As you can see they don’t come out and say we agree with you that you received foreign traffic, they did offer me a nice credit. With that said I was making a profit on the campaign even with this amount of foreign traffic being sent. So the credit is just icing on the cake, but this is something that is deserved by me as I am paying for US traffic not foreign traffic. This is just one example of why you need to track your campaigns by a third party software that tracks IP addresses etc. to monitor it for foreign traffic or even click fraud that you are billed for.  One other instance you can read about is from PepperJam Search and their $10,000 “Goodwill Credit” .