Yahoo's New Local Targeting Feature Showing Poor Quality Traffic?

A month ago, Yahoo made some serious enhancements to the search marketing platform, improving the local targeting capabilities amongst other features.

WebmasterWorld moderator, werty, has been gathering local data since the feature has been released and has posted the somewhat disappointing results. werty said in a WebmasterWorld thread:

Currently we are using "North American YSM" and should only be getting North American traffic, but if I look through our logs I can see that 29% of the traffic is coming from foreign countries.

I could see how maybe 2-3% could come from proxies or things like that, but this traffic is highly suspect.

Werty goes on to share:

Of those 2061 that we received we were billed for 1894. This is roughly 8% of "bad traffic" that is being caught or screened by Yahoo!

There is another 21% that is not being caught, screened or refunded.

The scariest/funniest part of this is; Of the 2061 clicks, only 43 came from Yahoo! or ca.search.yahoo.com. That is 2.1% of traffic we received or 2.3% of traffic we paid for.

These are some serious insights and hopefully this is only a bug that is impacting this individual advertiser. I do highly doubt it though and I wonder if Yahoo will respond to this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Yahoo responded in the thread asking:

werty, are you using the Blocked Continents tool? It allows you to select the continents from which you do not wish to receive traffic. (Our lawyers make me say this next part: The accuracy of the Blocked Continents feature is not guaranteed, and may vary depending on a number of factors, such as the quality and type of data in the traffic stream that we receive. For example, if a searcher is using a product or service that makes the IP address "anonymous," our systems will be unable to determine his/her location, and therefore will be unable to apply continent blocking.)

Follow these steps to turn on or modify Blocked Continents:

1. Click on the “Administration” tab.
2. Click on the “Account General Information” link
3. In the Blocked Continents field, select the checkbox for each continent to block. You cannot block your own continent, meaning the continent included in the market of your account.
4. Click “Save Changes”.