How is YPN Doing These Days?

I recently slapped YPN back on one of my sites to see if there has been any changes. I am seeing slightly better ad targetings. Or at least, I'm no longer getting ads for lawyers in Missouri for my car site, which is a major plus. They are still repeating ads like crazy, though, which is not so good. What's everyone else seeing lately with YPN? The rates still high, CTR, low, etc?

 

Hi Jack,
Yeah. I'm seeing the same. I have been going back and trying YPN ads on pages that I had to remove AS from, due to dropping EPC and CTR.

Yesterday, I could not believe it. On one page that I put YPN back on, they were able to serve THREE TARGETED ADS INSTANTLY, no refresh required. I refreshed a few times, and they STUCK (unlike a few months ago)! I tried another page - SAME THING! Another, SAME THING! So I kept going. Well, it didn't apply to every page. The only difference I could see was that the perfectly targeted pages have relatively high impressions. Or maybe it was the subject (all my pages are on different subjects). I sure hope that this continues.

Jack, I see you don't care for repeating ads. On the other hand, I LOVE repeating ads WHEN they are targeted - serve them to me all day long! Even when repeated, I think they are better than "San Jose Transmission Repair" on an SEO page.

My YPN EPC is about 4X AS. My YPN CTR has tripled (which isn't saying much). I STILL don't understand why my YPN CTR is 1/5 of AS, when the targeting is obviously perfect. Same ad blocks (changed slightly to conform with AS TOS), same colors, same location, etc. I find it hard to believe that the slightly different YPN font could account for this 5X discrepancy. So, maybe IPs other than mine get poor targeting? Something is going on with the CTR difference, but I sure can't figure out what it is. I really don't want to believe the "Occam's Razor" explanation - not all YPN clicks are being counted.

When YPN is able to target ads well, for everyone, consistantly, then AS may gain a truly viable competitor. And the ball game changes.

 

My theory on the repeating ads is that, if the visitor doesn't click on it the first time they see it, they won't do it the second or third time. So, the more variety of ads you can offer them, the higher the chances of a click.

 

I see YPN ads something like this.

Probability of a YPN click -
3% - new targeted ad (variety)
2% - old targeted ad
.5% - new untargeted ad (variety)
0% - old untargeted ad (not "close to" zero, but ZERO)

Why stop now? OK.

Probability of an AS click -
11% - new targeted ad (variety)
9% - old targeted ad
2% - new untargeted ad (variety)
0% - old untargeted ad (very "close to" zero)

Anyone need any wild, off-the-cuff, unsupported guesses on anything else? Ha! YMMV - no question about it!

There is much more to the equation than just the numbers above, even if they were accurate. When I have a page on AS that gets a ton of impressions, and few clicks, it MUST go. I believe that CTR has a large effect on EPC. CTR dilution cannot be tolerated on AS, but is fine on YPN. I don't move ads to YPN to make more money from YPN, but to PREVENT making less money on AS. The other big reason to move to YPN ads, is the recent addition of extremely low-paying ads that AS has added to the top slot in the first ad block. When you get weary from supporting the filter list.

 

I am in the process now of switching all of my websites to AdSense.

YPN's payout per click has plummeted for me, and I am still getting so many no relevant ads on most sites and pages, that it's a joke.

I do get more per click with YPN then I do with Adsense, but the AdSense ads are so highly relevant that I get tons more clicks, and it adds up to me making more with AdSense than with YPN.

 

It used to be the same for me, too.
But things are changing, due to the ads served by AS.
Previously, YPN paid me about 1/10 AS. Now, it is very close to 1/2.

One effect of the MFA purge, is the drop in CTR. The MFA folks wrote excellent ad copy, which got a very high CTR. Ad copy from non-MFA sites is not as good, but the EPC is much better. Whack-a-mole is not for me. It is so much easier to switch over to YPN, and forget about it, ESPECIALLY if YPN can properly target your page. It is all about time for me. And being hoodwinked.

 

I tried filtering low paying (I thought) ads with Adsense and my results went down. I let Google sort that out because it's in our best interest. Also my topics are more corporate so there aren't many MFA templates out there.

From the other side of YPN, YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) they aren't nearly as good as Adwords in usability and policy. They recently told us to trim the length of our ads down, not what you should ask users that have a superior option. Google seems to have the philosophy of giving advertisers ability to easily try a lot of keywords and it lets the market decide. They also are good at checking landing page quality.

YPN/YSM have a long way to go. The only reason they exist is because they can supply a marginal increase in traffic to Google organic and Google Adwords traffic.

 

tbar60 - Yes, they do have a long way to go. I agree. Some (me) have trivialized the task, but it is a big job - vision, direction, coordination, etc.

"How Is YPN Doing These Days"

Another data point, in the broader sense of the Title Question -

Today, when I access my stats, I notice that the "reported delay time" (*Estimated as of . . . ) is now about 15 MINUTES. It has been about 45 minutes for me for ages (6 months?).

AS does not report such a figure, but I have always assumed that it was pretty fast . . . could it be as fast as YPN?

 

I worked my way from engineering to web development and tend to build sites so they operate in real time. Old time programmers used to do batch programming to reconcile checking accounts overnight since you reported to the consumer in their monthly statement. Some of that mentality exists in reporting systems such as YPN, Kontera and others. There is some efficiency in batching changes but you can use smaller more frequent batches or improve your hardware or database schema so that reporting in in real or near real time.

I believe some of them record to log files and process the log files into a database that is used for reporting. I've always normalized my database and inserted directly into the database. I haven't dealt with the scale of YPN or Adsense but plenty of systems do it in real time. Ebay for example.

 

The thing is, it can't even be that hard to make the script so that it shows 1 ad from each different site on each page of a site rather than a few of the same ads shown on each page.

 

it's getting worse for me. I keep up just enough ads to be part of the program until they kick me out completely.

The changes they are making may or may not be in the right direction but the bottom line is Adsense is kicking their butt bad.

 

YPN gets worse everyday for me. Ad targeting is not any better and my earnings per click are going down.

 

I had a pretty good day yesterday with YPN. I've been noticing the relevancy FINALLY increasing to a point where the CTR is going up a noticeable amount.

On the other hand, I've also noticed that costs per click for some of my sites has definitely gone down with their new quality algorithm.

I just looked at one of my sites today, and I'm not sure WTF happened, but the ads seem less relevant today. Did YPN roll something back???! Hmm...

 

Yes, they changed something, I lost some targeting on several pages and now showing realarcade ads that has nothing to do with my site.
Of course income is down to the bottom again.