The past week has been a rough one for Yahoo, in terms of advertiser relations. First they emailed notifications of the terms and conditions, which got them in major hot water. Then even after the hot water, they had the nerve to make changes to advertiser's campaigns and keywords without permission or notification.

But it doesn't end there. Over the weekend, we are getting reports from WebmasterWorld from at least two different advertisers that Yahoo has turned on the advertiser's content network, even though the content network has been explicitly turned off by the advertiser in the master account settings. The interesting point is, that YahooPete, an official Yahoo representative said this should not be the case. Let me quote you:

I checked with the folks here who are managing the Account Optimization program, and they told me that turning Content Match on or off is not part of the program. So while I can’t say for sure why your settings might have changed, it wasn’t due to the optimization program.

As Zamboni pointed out, the “master setting” under the Administration tab in your account has the ultimate control over your account: If that account-level setting is set to “Off,” you should not receive any Content Match traffic in your entire account, no matter what the settings are at the campaign or ad group levels. We designed it this way to give advertisers more control of their tactic settings, so that certain campaigns could be set up solely for Content Match traffic, and others solely for Sponsored Search traffic.

But soon later, an advertiser claimed that this is not true. He said, "just a week or so back, I noticed that content was turned on for one of my campaigns even though content was set to off in "master setting"."

Now, it is hard to tell who is telling the truth and who is not. The bottom line, as we have been stressing throughout the week, is to make sure to check your accounts and make sure your ad dollars are being well spent.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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