YPN Ad targeting: worth bothering?

What kind of experience you guys have with the ad targeting feature? I tried using it out of desperation to get rid of the Vonages and florists PSA-likes, but it seems to do more damage than it solves problems on a diverse forum-like site like mine. First off, there seems to be too few categories. Besides, it looks like as soon as you pick a category, it locks the ads in, and instead of similar PSA-likes you get similar category ads that never rotate hence susceptible to blindness.

So, what's the collective intelligence of this group telling: use ad targeting or endure vonages and florists?

 

It stinks!!!!! So I pick the games category for a video games message board. What do I get? An ad for a wedding dress!!!!!

 

But you earn WAY more than contextually targeted ads.

 

I would use ad targeting, though I guess its a site to site decision to be made. I turned on ad targeting and my earnings more than doubled with more relevant ads.

 

Yeah, i get 20x more per click but 30x less clicks...

Math doesn't work for me, unfortunately.

Plus on some sites and places I prefer on-target ads because I think it enhances the overall experience, if you are going to use ads.

Yahoo's biggest problem is they have small ad inventorys in some segments.

I would even go as far as saying non-existant in some segments.

 

Right!!! I would rather keep it this way as long as it makes more, as long as I don't get the porn ads!

 

Ad targeting seems to work well for me. At least so far. I was able to monetize pages on my site that never made a dime with G, since G couldn't figure out good ads to show.

 

Can you guys send me an invite please

 

Sorry NameLegend, but I don't think any one has the power to send out invites to YPN but Yahoo.... If you applied recently, be patient. It took 4-5 weeks before I got in...

 

Their targetting of holiday stuff (example: (shameless plug) - my halloween page) is way off. I sent 'em a note suggesting they add holidays to their ad-targetting to try to improve this. I have a related halloween page that is dynamically generated that switches between Adsense (95% now) and YPN ... I can always tell the Yahoo ads right away because they are so off-base.

But they should get better over time, and in other areas, they seem to do pretty well for me.

 

I E-mailed them about a week ago with target suggestions. They didn't change it at all.

 

Alex, I experienced something very similar when I rotated ads between AdSense and YPN. Turns out it was the rotation itself that was preventing more relevant ads from being displayed by YPN. It might not be the same case for everyone, but you can read about Rotating YPN and AdSense - Bad Idea which talks about my experience rotating ads, what the YPN engineers had to say about it, and that turning down the frequency of rotation fixed the problem for me.

 

Interesting article you wrote ... maybe I'll try a rotation test on a page where YPN *does* to a good job. Yea, Yahoo's definition of PSA's is pretty bogus - I'd love a list of the Comcast, Vontage, Lending Tree's, etc. to block since they are just annoying and pop up quite a bit.

I put YPN on this low-volume halloween page which is static HTML ... I'd say their ad relevence still needs some work in this area.

 

Unfortunately from what I was told since they are considered PSAs adding them to your Ad Block list doesn't do any good. This matches what I've experienced as I still occasionally get those ads even when they have been in my block list for a few days.

 

Hi Tim,

Wanted to chime in about your blog and clarify that the ads you mentioned are not PSAs but are “Run of network” ads, which we call RON ads. RON ads are more generic, category based ads (typically financial services) and publishers do get paid for RON ads. We serve RON ads when a publisher first signs up until we have had a chance to crawl or when the crawler finds sensitive content.

Sorry for the confusion, there was a miscommunication of information from our customer rep. Feel free to drop me a private note if you need more details.

YahooSarah

 

Thanks for the additional information, YahooSarah. It didn't make sense that Vonage, Comcast, etc would be "PSAs". However, this brings me back to the original question now armed with new information.... is it possible to block the RON ads? I added vonage.com, www.vonage.com, etc to my block list quite a few days ago however they still appear. I suppose though that blocking those RON ads would just result in other RON ads though?

 

Hey Tim-
Glad to be of help. To answer your question of blocking RON ads - no you can’t block those now but we are considering providing publishers with the controls to do that. In the meantime, we are listening to your feedback so continue to post your thoughts. Thanks

YahooSarah

 

Could you translate this for us... From E-Mail support about having more than one ad unit per page, we get...

while

and



say we can have more than one per page. I think E-mail support needs to know about the policy on this.

A good question to add to the FAQ would be 'How many ad units can we have per page?'
https://publisher.yahoo.com/help/faq/

 

You can have multiple YPN ads on one page. I also have an e-mail from Yahoo OK'ing it.
Question is: do you want to? Unlike AdSense multiple ad units they show same ads! This pretty much renders them useless. Well, to be fair I'd have to say that sometimes you will get slightly different ads because the CPC auction may have changed the advertisers positions in the split second between the ad loads, but it's a joke compared to AdSense's completely different set of ads.

 

When she mentioned RON ads, first thing I thought of was the cheesy movie Captian Ron...LOL.. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103924/)

Captain RON ad's!

Okay...sorry...back on topic. Now we can stop calling them Vonage Ads, Florist Ads, or PSA's. Glad they now have a name. I feel much better