YPN's new ad targeting with categories

[Jenstar]

One of the problems with YPN right now is on relevancy - the ads tends to be more loosely targeted to the theme of a site rather than tightly target right down to a page level, similar to how AdSense primarily targets. And one of the unfortunate side effects many are seeing is a lower CTR when compared to AdSense... although most are also noting a much higher EPC.

One of the ways to influence your ads and hopefully improve ad relevancy is to use YPN's new ad targeting feature, which allows you to target up to 50 URLs/sites/directories with up to two different categories.

Before you get your hopes up and think you can target a mesothelioma category (which there isn't one anyway!) on your cooking site, there are some built in spam preventions. So don't think you can take your site about hockey and use a financial related category to get loans or mortgage financing ads to appear It won't work unless there also happens to be something on-page that is related to loans or mortgage financing too

There are a wide range of categories - 20 categories and 134 sub categories, to be exact, although some categories that struck me as definitely being on the *odd* side (tattoos and botanical gardens?) YPN is also asking beta publishers to submit ideas for more categories.

This was actually released last week, but an email from the YPN team was sent out officially announcing it this week.

More here (scroll down): https://publisher.yahoo.com/help/faq/

Targeting takes about 4-6 hours, although it does seem to take effect much quicker than that. And no changes are needed to any of your javascript or webpages, which is really, really nice. It is all done in the control panel.

Has anyone used this yet, and what are your initial results?

[rustybrick]

I use it on this page http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002508.html

It only serves up "Answering Service" ads, even though I am set to serve up Computer Security ads.

Keep in mind the ad might be a Google ad, I have the ads on 50/50 rotation.

Also the image capture is slightly off, but trust me, its set up right in YPN.

[all4jah]

Yes, I've used it and so far it's terribly off. I'm thinking that since this is a new thing they still haven't ironed out the kinks and maybe they just don't have enough advertisers for my website. It's about farming, and yet everything I get is tech-related. You would think they'd at least have a few advertisers related to gardening and such.

I've waited two days for any changes to my Yahoo! ad and so far the custom targetting hasn't worked. I'm going to give it a few more days then it's permanently back to Google until the Publisher Network works better.

We have recently implemented the Ads by Yahoo and it seems to be working better than Google Adsense. All ads are well targeted and we're got some good return so far. Maybe it is due to the nature of our site since we belong to one of the proposed categories (career).

Anne
http://www.jobtiz.com

[sootledir]

The targeting is still poor for me, but I'm patient.

[AussieWebmaster]

I have just started with YPN and though the CPC is higher the CTR is much lower... am tweaking it but am leaning towards keeping it all Google.