Does anyone have any feedback on the Yahoo Publisher Network? We signed up, but haven't used them yet. Most of our sites use Google and it works out pretty well. We thought about testing a few with Yahoo ads, but wanted to find out from others what they thought.
I only use adsense so I'm not sure but I believe most people prefer it over ypn. You should try it on one of your sites just to see what happens and then post the results here. I'm curious.
The only way you are going to know if YPN works for you is by trying it. No one is going to be able to say if it will work for you. I run YPN on over 50% of my sites. It works on some, and doesn't on others. It really comes down to ad relevancy and ad inventory.
mjewel, How quick is the ypn crawler? I've got 500k plus pages that have been indexed by the adsnse bot and don't know if I can afford wait for Yahoo to visit to get relevant ads.
You'll get a bot visit within a few seconds, but whether or not the ads will be relevant is another story. You can ad target by url in advance, but it isn't a guarantee your ads will ever be relevant. YPN also seems to adjust ads after a longer period of time has passed - perhaps a full-indexing? I've had relevant ads immediately, and then days later, relevant ads will cease on a particular page because of a stop word (a word they feel is negative and which prevents all but the "RON - run of network" ads). YPN is in beta - their contextual method for serving ads is far behind google - so you really have to evaluate the program on a site by site basis. It works realy well for some sites, poorly for others. If you have a large percentage of International traffic you will need to make sure you don't display YPN to those visitors or you might get banned. It isn't a problem for me, but it has been for others. You can also run YPN on one page and Adsense on another (both allow it), so you might want to experiment before converting an entire site.
hhhmmm. . . Sounds like I need to do some test & mesaure before jumping in. . Thanks for the feedback. -jay
Absolutely. As others have noted, it works for some of us and not for others. One thing I noticed early on was that I'd get impressive dollars per click for a small number of clicks, but it never scaled - in other words, I might have had $17.00 first thing in the morning but the end of the day wouldn't be much more. Google might only have half of that at the same point, but would end up much higher at the end. I think that's probably do to more limited ad inventory, so if they ever get this off the ground, it might improve. I think they may have done severe damage by testing without sufficient inventory - it could turn a lot of us off and we might not look back. That's probably the same for Chitika.. too bad, because we could use some real competition to Google.
As I said, it works for some sites and doesn't on others. As a general statement, Yahoo pays more per click but because they have a much smaller inventory of ads, the conversion rate is generally lower.... i.e. yahoo might pay $1.00 a click vs. 75 cents for adsense, but adsense you might get twice as many clicks running adsense. In that scenerio, it would be better to run adsense even though yahoo pays more per click. You can't just look at what you get per click, it really depends on payment per click and click through rate. Sometimes Yahoo won't show any relevant ads so you really have no choice but to run adsense. You have to make a decision on a per website, or even per page, basis. It's better on about half my sites, but there are many factors and there is really no way to tell how it will perform for a particular site before you test it on that site. Yahoo also uses stop words, i.e. there are words that will prevent relevant ads from showing because yahoo thinks the page is being negative to whatever the advertiser is offering - and it doesn't work very well. Yahoo also doesn't pay for International clicks, and a large percentage of International traffic can even get your account terminated. Just one more thing you have to factor in.
Thanks for the good insight. It all makes sense. Maybe we will try to integrate it into a small percentage of our published pages to see how it performs in the next few months.
I belong to both YPN and Adsense programs and have done considerable experimenting on various pages on my site. The general conclusions are: - YPN's ability to display relevant ads is far inferior to Google's, which produces lower CTR. - YPN's pay-per-click is higher, in general, than Google's (how long will it last?), but the lower CTR negates this benefit in most cases. - YPN's targeting categories and sub-categories are much too limited and too broad, and it doesn't seem to work anyway. After my experimentation with YPN, all except one page are back to Adsense. For some strange reason, even though the ads are not particularly relevant, this page makes significantly more money with YPN than with Adsense ($35-$65/day vs. $3-$7/day) Moral of this story: Do your own experimentation and determine what works best for you, on a page by page basis.
I have most of m sites running YPN, but some of my other sites have trouble with ad relevancy so I use adsense on those. We'll see after out of beta when the prices drop who I'll stick with.
That's certainly odd. Have you looked at what's bringing people to that page? Maybe the ads YPN shows are relevant to whatever concept attracted the traffic? In my perfect world, my ad generation would track performance per page and would vary parameters (provider, placement, etc.) automatically, honing in on best performance. However, that would really only be possible for pages with enough activity to be able to observe the effects of changes, and my income is mostly wide spectrum: spread rather evenly across a large number of pages. I do have a few stellar performers, though, so I'll try some more experiments: I honestly never thought of the idea that YPN might hit better on specific pages and have always been looking at it from the overall viewpoint.
The page is getting very targeted traffic, primarily from MSN and Yahoo. Although many of the ads served up by YPN are slightly related, none are directly related as with Adsense, and some are way beyond related. Yet visitors click on the ads, which pay very well. It just shows you can't predict what your visitors will or will not do. Experiment, experiment, experiment.
if you haven't checked out ypn, you need to... if for no other reason than to move all of your low-performing pages over there, where they will make more money than they ever did with adsense. of course that may change over time, lol... i'm still in the honeymoon phase! one big advantage you have with ypn is the ability to target your pages with whatever ad categories you want... the categories are too general for many niches, but for some people, it's going to work well. get an adserver going and learn how to control your ad inventory... be able to swap every ad on any page, at a moments notice.