Does anyone have experience with ad targeting vs. using no ad targeting? For just about as long as I have been with YPN, I have been using ad targeting. However, the ads weren't relevant 100% still and CTR never reached too high. So, does anyone have experience with improved performance without ad targeting and does the ads really improve over time like YPN has suggested?
You get better results with ad targeting. If you think that ad relevancy is not that great right now, wait until you remove ad targeting.
i completely disagree with that statement. i use pure contextual targetting. as for improvement over time, i have not seen that to be the case at all. but, as with all things, you have to try it, test it and make your own conclusions for your site / niche / visitors. 1 guy i know removed ad targetting and got 9 cent ads. needless to say he turned ad targetting back on the next day, not even bothering to figure out the who, what, why, when and where. i guess hes happy with the 50 cent ads.
The only problem I have with ad targetting is if there are no ads for the context...they fill in the blank spaces with whatever...but the same can be said for not using ad targetting...I tend to like it better rather than not using it.
I turned off the ad targeting and gave it a go. At first the ads were totally off, however after a couple hours the ads became more targeted. But income seems down, not sure if it is just YPN being weird like it normally is, or actual income will be lower at the end of the day. One problem I have found however with the ads is that I have found several which are completely false. For example: "Free Costume Contest" Join our free costume contest receive up to $10,000 in prizes www.blahblah.com Then if you click on it, you go to a site about something totally unrelated, say a site for buying airline tickets. I just don't understand why someone would go through the trouble of buying ads for this. It is totally unrelated, I doubt the company makes any money for it. As well, why doesn't Yahoo check somehow on if the ads are related to the website? :\
This would not have happened if Yahoo had fixed its targeting. Due to this, since we are getting these kind of ads it is affecting our RPC..
After looking at yesterday's stats, it's a little tough to tell if it was either better or worse. With the updates going on, the pageviews were a little off from last Thursday so it's hard to compare. I do know that there were more clicks than usual, but less per click, but about the same earnings as what I would expect. I'll have to run it for a few more days to totally make sure on what is happening.
You've got to pay the bills, especially when I get 1000 uniques a day and only manage to get 0.01% CTR because the ads are so far out there that it isnt even related to the generalized category of my website. I've tried it both ways and would be head over heels if I managed a $0.50 click. Since the update, the same ads are paying 1/2 to 1/3rd of the original.. meanwhile, the same advertisers are paying very high prices on Overture for these very keywords. Unfortunately, and unprofessionally, Yahoo has YPN backed into a corner lately.
That's exactly my reason for trying new things with YPN/Adsense. After the update YPN ads were paying about a third of what they were before. Low and behold with the Google update I'm receiving twice as much traffic as before with a couple very good, medium paying keywords (which is good for a literature site, which usually has very low paying keywords). The result? Still lower payment than before YPN's "improvements". So I tried something new by taking the ad targeting off, didn't work at all. It would show about 2 of 4 ads "relevant" and the other 2 completely off the wall sometimes and at other times they would use their "geo-targeting" and show ads completely unrelated, however in the city of where they THINK the IP is. Which of course, is completely off. I am not in St. Louis YPN! I am about a 6 hour drive away from there. So I am trying Adsense full-time now... I use to do it US-YPN, International-Adsense. If the math works out correctly, I should make a lot more going full-time Adsense.... however, I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. I have tried this before and received horrible results. This site receives about 80% US visitors, 20% International visitors. Both, generally seeking the same thing. So one would think that going full-time Adsense it would be a huge increase in earnings, right? Right? Wrong. The other times I tried this, I received only twice as much earnings as going only Internationally. This update cracked all the eggs in the basket.
I get the feeling that Yahoo is in a cash crunch.. especially when you take numbers into consideration. AT&T doesnt want to keep paying yahoo the $250m per year for the co-branded AT&t/Yahoo DSL franchise. Thats nearly 25% of Yahoo's revenue. The difference is that Google makes more from Adsense alone (even excluding major sites) than Yahoo makes period.
Yahoo's net income is about 1B/year, however their revenue is around 5.5B/year. While Google's net income is 2.5B/year, with it's revenue around 8B http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4350 http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39165373,00.htm During Q4, Google's revenue was about 1/2 of Yahoo's entire year due to AdSense. Yahoo is really missing the boat.