Have you recently been receiving a high percentage of leads or customers from countries you are not targeting from Yahoo! Sponsored Search?

If you've been using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines, you will probably know that Yahoo! Search Marketing (formally Overture) is the industry's leader. Although there are many PPC search engines on the market which are less expensive, Yahoo! reaches a far greater audience which is why it's been a personal favorite advertising source for the past 3 years... until now.

Although Yahoo! Sponsored Search has constantly produced great results for me personally, the past 3-4 months has seen a major increase of leads coming from other countries. Even though I'm targeting a U.S. audience with "Advanced" and "Content Match" disabled, 45% of leads I now receive are from outside of the U.S. This results in lower upgrade conversions for the services I'm promoting.

Overture used to produce a small percentage (about 5%) of Non-US leads, but this was probably due to having Content Match enabled which I no longer use. These results even remained constant after Overture and Yahoo! combined their search marketing products in April 2005... until recently that is.

After contacting Yahoo! support about this problem, it was suggested that I modify my Titles and/or Descriptions to target a particular audience. While this would probably work, this shouldn't have to be necessary with having a U.S. account that targets a U.S. audience. I don't expect 100% of the leads produced to come from the U.S... no PPC system can produce such results, but 45% of leads now being non-US is calls for concern.

Why is this suddenly happening? I'm not entirely sure but I will be monitoring this situation very closely. If Yahoo! cannot rectify this problem... and it is a problem, then they could possibly lose some advertising customers because of it...

What is the point of having country-specific targeting if it's clearly not working as expected?... and how many clicks are not converting because of it? This then leads me to other, more serious questions: Am I now susceptible to click-fraud, for example - but that's for another day. In the meantime, I just hope things improve.

Derek Jones is the owner of Mirage Home Business Systems, a service that's geared to helping people start a profitable Home-Based Business online. For more details on starting a Work at Home Internet Business and to join our Free Home Business Tips Newsletter, visit: http://www.HomeBusinessCreation.com