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The first place I looked was to see what types of ad sizes are available. I was sure by now there would be an Adlinks format. The earnings from the addition of Adlinks to my site some years ago was a pleasant, unexpected surprise.
For whatever reason YPN does not offer this format. While I have no real knowledge about the workings of YPN, as one who has programmed extensively in the past, wouldn't you expect that adding a rudimentary form of this one type of feature would take a single YPN employee no more than a week and at the outside a month? We're talking about a variation on an existing theme, not creating something from scratch.
Then I went to the Ad Categories section to see what Ad Categories and subcategories existed. I still have hard feelings about all of the bottled water adds YPN served on my health related site in the begining of YPN. And no, bottled water doesn't really figure in with the content of my site. I just Googled this, in the serval hundred pages of content of my site the term "water" is used on 3 of them.
It seemed so to implement the categories feature I was going to have to choose a category that, yes, possibly included my topic but seemed to put me at risk of getting a bunch of totally unrelated ads too. It would be like if I had a site about golf carts that I would have to choose the automotive sub category be cause no closer fit existed. Is there anything more important with a program like YPN than both the advertiser and publisher feeling confident about the ad targeting?
When looking at the sub category list it was painfully obvious how overlapping subcategories could be created so to drill down to a grouping of ads that would be preditably on-target for me as a publisher and the participating advertisers. (By the way, I didn't see a link to click that would show me what type of ads to expect from each sub category.) And once again, wouldn't expanding on the sub categories lists take one or two employees possibly a month or two? This is scut work not rocket science.
Does anyone with any imagination work at YPN? Why don't they want this program to work?
One thing I've learned in my experience with YPN is that the ad targeting feature will not work unless the page you assign it to already has text on it that triggers matches for a particular category. (On a page about dogs, you can't have ads related to horses unless you're already talking about horses.) I have not seen any improvement in ad targeting by specifying the targeting. In fact, it seems to be useless.
The only real benefits I've gained by using YPN on some pages instead of AdSense are that I can remove AdSense ads from some poor-performing pages; and YPN provides an empty ad filter, in contrast to my AdSense filter which for some time has been full.
Speaking of filtering, I should point out that there are vastly fewer ads pointing to MFA sites with YPN than is the case with AdSense.
In all fairness, the YPN program is still relatively young. I see no point in giving up on it.
At least you can phone YPN and talk to a rep. I wish I could do that with AdSense.
Other than that, I keep YPN of some pages (about 25 at the moment) hoping it gets better, but marginal is about all there is so far, compared to when I had Adsense on the same pages.
This is about the 3rd or 4th set of pages I've tried YPN on. The earlier sets did well enough for about 30 days and then earnings would take a dive.
I haven't a clue why that happens.
Why hasn't YPN added adlinks? Good question. Obviously it's working for adsense. I mean how close does your ear have to be to the ground to know that? Publishers have been singing adlink songs from the time they were first introduced and if YPN doesn't know this they're not paying attention. They monitor this forum. Maybe they should start monitoring the adsense forum as well.
I run a family friendly site and value that image.
As I said before, it is not a targeting issue for ypn it is an inventory issue. Yahoo simple doesn't have enough inventory to serve the right ads even it can figure out your content right.
It all depends. On one of my tech sites, I see a good number of tech and computing-related YPN ads--on some pages. On other pages, even pages where I have applied Ad Targeting overrides to coerce the ad categories to Computer [this or that computing subcategory], I see all sorts of off-topic ads that have nothing whatsoever to do with computing technology.
Yes, it's an inventory issue. But surely it's a targeting issue also.
YPN can help itself:
1) Limit the number of publishers until the system is stabilized and there is an oversupply.
2) Communicate with publishers on what ad categories are appropriate for their web sites and keep them abreast of those inventory levels so they can adjust to secondary/tertiary categories
3) Limit the number of ads on a page to no more than 3.
One thing that I feel the YPN could improve is to create a view on a publisher website basis. For example, in the control panel, the first thing we should see after logging in is a default tab listing all the websites that are registered with YPN. Sort of how like Google sets up its Sitemaps feature.
In that list could be a hint on what YPN feels is the best targeted category for that website.
Here's an example view:
Publisher: Homey Enterprises
Website Primary Category Secondary Category Third Category Chosen Category
=======================================================================
Foo1.com Financial credit Financial debt Auto Passenger Financial credit
Foo2.com Beauty Health Beauty Products Art venues Art Venues
.
.
FooN.com Fashion Accessories Fashion Jewelry Fashion Shoes Beauty Products
This way, the system tells the publisher which categories are preferred based on present ad inventory levels and the publisher can adjust. Under each category should be a visual bar (30% out of 100%) to indicate the current advertising level over an average of say, 20 days. This way the publisher can adjust his/her ad allocation. This alleviates the system from an overdemand/undersupply situation.
When you click on the Foo1.com link, it takes you to that website's statistics of URL, channel, etc. information.
The way it stands, we are looking at things on a channel or URL basis that is all merged together on a whole. And its so darn slow to bring up historical reports - often timing out.
Publishers have websites. A website has pages. A page has ads. What happened to this view?
As I said before, it is not a targeting issue for ypn it is an inventory issue. Yahoo simple doesn't have enough inventory to serve the right ads ....
Thank you.
They're playing kid sister and dragging up the rear. They don't have the numbers. If you've got the numbers targeting becomes extremely easier to do, you have such a wider base to draw from. The more ads you have - the easier it is to match them to your target audience. YPN doesn't have that. Adsense has it in spades and it's one of the key components of their success.
When MSN rolls out it won't have it either. Everybody's playing catch-up to Adsense right now and unless somebody comes up with something totally revolutionary and totally new it just ain't gonna happen. Massive influx of advertiser's dollars.. that's what's needed. Yahoo can't generate that. MSN can't generate that. Google OWNS contextual advertising and they probably will for some time to come.
