What can I say. I know that for my category there are plenty of advertisers, yet YPN has a hard time figuring out what to show. It almost seems as if they have a nearly infinite repository of refinance and real estate advertisers that they push onto their publishers sites at all cost. Example: I have a page related to Hawaii (lets say Travel) and I get tons of ads about Hawaii Real Estate, even though there are probably a lot of advertisers for the Travel Industry. So I target this page to Travel (Accomodation and Vacation) and I still see the page full of real estate. Blocked about 20 of them but there are simply 20 new ones (if the blocking works, often YPN overrules it)
In addition to making the ads "relevant" they are probably also tryin to maximize the ad revenue also. You should try tweaking your content to get ads that you think are more appropriate.
I am against the whole tweaking content for ads movement. I make content for the sake of making content not for the sake of making two bucks more a day. I firmly believe that quality content (my number of returning visitors speaks for itself) does not need to be tweaked. I have no problem with YPN to try to maximize revenue. I just think they have way too many real estate and refinance advertisers that they need to place, no matter what.
I consider an ad to be sufficiently targeted if the page keyword keyword is somewhere in the bold headline.
I agree...besides, you ever thought that people looking at your website thinking of traveling might also be in real estate? Not sure, but I have heard the real estate links pay ok...
whether it pays ok or not is not really the point. targetting should be based on what your page is about, not what your page is similarly about or what else your users may or may not be interested in. especially when you consider they terminate for "low conversions". if ads arent targetted properly, more than likely they are going to convert poorly. personally, i dont use ad targetting because they shove the ads they want in my face. i go solely for contextual targetting and i have no problem tweaking my content to draw the ads i believe my visitors would be most interested in. i understand you dont want to tweak your content to get the ads you want, but then you either have to live with it or you have to use a better targetted provider like Google. you should at least try to tweak your content, even if on a few pages, you may be suprised at the results you can yield and may even fare better off than you were before. jmo
Thanks Karagold, I see it the same way. I have thousands of pages and I cannot tweak them each time some ad setup has a brainfart. It should be smart enough to figure out what its about, especially since it is very transparent to search engines (good html). The next time YPN! changes the algo I go back and tweak thousands of pages?
one of my websites is a image hosting website and this advertisment "Search Engine Marketing Company Find practical, reliable business information on home based businesses and home offices at www.allbusiness.com" tell me that is not irrelevant? the worst part is that i have ad targeting for it etc :/ harrison
i hear you andre. you shouldnt have to build the site to suit ypn, ypn should be doing what it can to suit you. if you havnt already, why dont you give them a call. i had 1 site (main site) which would not target properly for squat. i left ads off of that site because of this. they called me. and after talking to them, they really helped tweak things out and that site targetted really well afterwards. im not sure, but they may have some tools at their disposal that we dont have. this was a long time ago, but i do remember they went way out of their way to make sure i would use ypn on my site. they had called me to ask why i wasnt using ypn on my main site and to see what they could do to help me. anyway, good luck.
Yahoo has always been more interested in the "now money" than doing what is best for their site or partners. Just look at how they destroyed their directory and fumbled paid inclusions to the point of ridiculosness. Good luck trying to talk them out of displaying ads from those who paid the most to Yahoo.
YPN targeting sucks I have tried using both contexual ad matching and categories but either way i only seem to get real estate ads and pet ads lol