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That’s Relevant May 13, 2009 2:39

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7 ways to help you get more relevant YPN ads

Everybody wants relevant ads on their pages—the more relevant they are, the more they’re clicked and the more you’re paid. But how can you ensure that the ads on the page are as relevant as they can be?  Here are some tips to help get more relevant and targeted ads .

Use YPN ad targeting

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) has a targeting feature unique to the YPN platform called ad targeting.  With this, you can specify the targeting category in which your page or site fits best.  There are 20 categories and 127 subcategories to choose from.  You can target an entire site, a directory, even selecting specific pages.  You are limited to 50 targeting sites/directories/pages in your Ad Categories section.  It is worth noting that you don’t have to specifically use the targeting for the page content, you can also target based on your user’s interests.  So if your blog is about blogging, you could decide to use the “Office Electronics” category since you assume many of those who are learning about blogging may also be interested in office gadgets and electronics.

And best of all, if you don’t feel any of the options are best for you, you can explore new categories and subcategories.

Optimize your titles

Yes, there are still people who have just their site name as the title tag on every page of their site.  (What? You?) So make sure you have an appropriate title for each page on your site.  Not only will this help with ad targeting, but it will also be a huge benefit in the search index too.  If someone sees your page in the search results, it might be the perfect page for what they are looking for, but if all they see in the title tag is “My Site Name at MySiteName.com”, changes are extremely high they will go onto the next result where the title tells them the page is what they are looking for and not just the generic site name.

Optimize your meta tags

Since meta tags have faded as a regular search optimization technique, many of us have gotten lazy about doing them at all.  But adding metas can help for ad targeting, and still give you some benefits in the search index.  And if you have forgotten how to do them, or never learned, here are samples:

<META name=”description” content=”A very short blurb about what the page is about.”>
<META name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, etc”>

Excessive keywords

Sure, someone told you mesothelioma ads pay really well, but adding the word mesothelioma 100 times in tiny text at the bottom won’t help your ad targeting, nor will the search engines like it very much.  So while having a good keyword density will help target your ads, going overboard won’t help… especially if your site is about cooking and nothing to do with mesothelioma!  Just make sure you have the appropriate keywords in your content, but not so repetitive that it seems odd to anyone reading it.

Block non-relevant ads

Sometimes you may see ads that don’t fit the context of your page—maybe it’s confusion over things such as “apple” vs. “Apple.” In this case, take advantage of the YPN ad blocking feature.  Just block the URL of the advertiser to prevent the ad from appearing.  If you keep seeing these ads on particular page, consider changing the suspect keywords if they aren’t key to your search engine optimization of that page.

Great content

Yes, this should be a given, but not many people remember this, judging by some of the sites I have seen out there.  Good, quality content tends to have the best targeted ads. The content of the site, combined with other factors (many of which are listed in this article), drive the types of ads placed on your site.  The advertisers who are willing to place ads on your site do so based on matching the content of your site to their ads as closely as possible. And, of course, you will be giving your users the best experience available.  Don’t forget that if someone lands on a site with really bad content, they are much more likely to quickly hit the back button than they ever are to actually click one of the ads you have on the page.

Clean up your sidebars

Sidebars are a great spot to put all kinds of miscellaneous stuff, along with navigation, especially for those who are running YPN on a blog.  But all that extra text, such as links to memes, blogrolls and widgets can contribute to your ad targeting.  So if you are finding the ads are too general to the site (especially if you have an extensive navigation system) and not specific enough to the individual pages, all the “extras” on the page could be the culprit.

If you are having problems with your ad targeting, these tips will likely help solve some, if not all, of your targeting issues.  And when you have great targeting, you will end up with a much higher click-through rate, meaning more revenue in your pocket.

Giving power to the Purple—our colleagues have churned out some cool stuff lately

Everyone should be allowed to toot their own horns once in a while. For us this is especially true, if those sounds represent products and services that could help, or be of interest to, our publishers.

In recent weeks, some of our fellow Yahoos have taken the lid off of several exciting projects, and we thought we’d share the good news…

Thanking the monkey

The Yahoo! Developer Network just introduced an enhancement to SearchMonkey, our open search platform. The new feature, as described here in the Yahoo! Search blog, enables site owners and developers to embed flash video, games and documents directly into Yahoo! Search results. Publishers can just add a few lines of code to their embedded item, the Yahoo! webcrawler will pick it up, and your listings in Yahoo! SERPs will go bananas with eye-catching images.

The best of the Web, made for TV

You might think that accessing the Internet via a television screen has been tried and failed—and you’d be right. But this is something different: Yahoo!’s TV Widgets is now being built into sets from manufacturers like Samsung and others, enabling users to interact with their favorite Web services while they watch TV. We believe that this intelligent integration is what was lacking from previous attempts at marrying television and the Web. TV Widgets picked up several “Best of CES” awards in January—tune into the details here.

New Demo Targeting and Dayparting

If you do any type of pay-per-click advertising, this is going to be welcome news: Yahoo! Search Marketing just introduced several major enhancements to our Sponsored Search product, including ad scheduling, a dayparting tool for setting the display of ads at different times and days across an entire week; and bid adjustments, which lets you specify a premium bid amount for desired demographic groups and audiences. Take a short hop over to the YSM blog for more details. Another print newspaper bites the dust

Finally, because there’s still some news outside of Yahoo!, here’s one non-purple item: An interesting article on the continuing struggles of the print media industry. Almost daily, large traditional print publishers are moving resources to their online operations. For Web publishers, does this engender a bit of smugness and pride that you were here first; or cause fear, as you may be faced with a higher level of competition from deep-pocketed corporations?

Yahoo! is helping newspapers make this transition through our APT product serving the Newspaper Consortium, but the continuing exodus of printed papers begs another question: With what will future generations line bird cages and wrap fish?

Partnership lets PCMag target its users on Yahoo! pages

The PCMag Digital Network, the online publishing arm of Ziff Davis Media, has always delivered active tech shoppers to its advertisers through its technology reviews. However, when demand began to outpace supply, it took a partnership with Yahoo! to deliver more impressions to help advertisers reach those buyers when they weren’t reading reviews.

The Problem:

PCMag Digital Network wanted to offer its advertisers more traffic on its most coveted reviews pages, such as those in its printer and laptop sections. Although PCMag Digital Network reviews over 2000 products a year, demand for advertising on reviews pages outstripped supply. PCMag Digital Network needed a way to offer its advertisers higher volumes of its most targeted tech buyers.

The Solution:

The company formed a partnership with Yahoo! that lets its advertisers reach users on Yahoo! pages, exponentially expanding PCMag.com’s available advertising space.

The Yahoo! partnership brought huge benefits to PCMag Digital Network and its advertisers. PCMag Digital Network was able to expand its targeted inventory to the Yahoo! site, reaching its most targeted readers in a new environment.

“This partnership with Yahoo! makes it easier for advertisers to reach more of our highly targeted, influential tech buyers,” says Jim Selden, VP of marketing for the PCMag Digital Network.

But it wasn’t just the extra pages that appealed to the PCMag Digital Network — it was the way it could retarget its readers on the Yahoo! site. Roughly 90 percent of PCMag.com visitors read its reviews, and more than 70 percent plan on buying technology products, services, or consumer electronics within the next 12 months. So there’s a huge benefit to serving an ad to a review reader even when that person isn’t on PCMag.com. Through the partnership, if someone reads a printer review on PCMag.com, PCMag Digital Network can “follow” that user onto the Yahoo! pages. An advertiser could serve a printer ad to that user hours, days or even weeks later, no matter what type of content the user was reading.

“Being able to retarget advertisers from specific sections is a huge benefit,” says Crystal Luginbuhl, director of client services at PCMag Digital Network. “An advertiser of printers is interested in an audience who is researching printers. Through Yahoo! retargeting, these tech-related ads can follow a user throughout the day on our network site and on to Yahoo! sites.”

The Results:

The Yahoo! partnership increases the amount of inventory PCMag Digital Network can offer its advertisers by more than 400 percent, which can help keep advertiser spending high even when the PCMag Digital Network’s own inventory is tight. Because the partnership still allows advertisers to target potential buyers, they can serve ads on Yahoo! without sacrificing performance. “Our consumer electronic categories yield comparable click-through results,” Luginbuhl says, “and combined with greater reach and scale and lower cost per impressions, that greatly benefits the advertiser.”!