We were running our standard end of month PPC reports today and came across something quite interesting for one client. On Yahoo! they experienced a huge increase in impressions, although we changed nothing major within the campaign. We have content network switched off and these results are very much out of the blue as you can see:

Feb	Impressions	Clicks
X Y	2618	20
X Y Z	1500	6

March	Impressions	Clicks
X Y	24,351	16
X Y Z	44,446	26

(X Y Z stand for different words, with X Y Z being an extension of X Y)

Having looked a little further into when these clicks occurred they always arrived in short bursts. The first came between Monday the 10^th of March and finished Friday the 14^th of March. The next burst came between Monday 24^th of March and lasted until Friday the 4^th of April. To me this looks like a testing period; from Monday to Friday and then a longer period of two weeks, including a weekend.

Having thought about this and considered going mad, we called Yahoo! After some denial on the second call they did mention that they might be “trialling new partners” but that they didn’t have any available information at the moment.

Looking to a number of our other clients who are also on Yahoo! we have notice similar trends over similar time periods, with nothing but tweaks made to the campaign.

Interesting, something is going on behind the scenes with Yahoo! the question is just what?