Well, boys and girls, I've ended my little experiment early. I've returned to ad targeting on many of the sites I own, but not all. I really didn't want to, but I was seeing too much empty space on certain pages, i.e. only 1 ad showing in a 728x90 ad unit. Furthermore, on certain page I was getting too many unrelated ads (those V-o_n=a-g_e ads came back with a vengeance.) In all fairness to Team YPN, I should note that on pages where I have mostly content, YPN is performing very well for the most part, displaying perfectly or near-perfectly matched ads. I was mostly having trouble with pages that are low on content, like a pages that contain lots of figures (data tables, etc.) On low content pages, why can't the YPN algo' extrapolate based on the TITLE and H1/H2/H3/H4 tags and a few keywords? Shouldn't be that hard, right? But I guess they're working on it. Just venting about a minor frustration here; I'm really not complaining, as the program is still in beta mode. Given a choice, I still prefer YPN over that other program.
Yeah, I totally wimped out. But I don't regret the experiment, as I want to see what happens when targeting is "reset." I also wanted to review my targeting options, to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything new or improved.
i wonder if you gave enough time for contextual targetting to really kick in. i've noticed that once a page targets, sometimes it gets stuck and has trouble retargetting properly. i understand though about your "lack of content" pages. good luck to you and thanks for sharing
Sometimes YPN handles low content pages well, e.g. the merchant account page in my SIG below. Perfectly matched ads on that page 90%+ of the time, and content is limited. I guess it depends on the inventory and category. I'm hoping that the new Panama platform will translate to improved YPN targeting and inventory. As always, IMO
That's good that you went back with targetting. as i said before, if you are not getting much, change category to less relavent to your website & see what happened. I think it will not make much difference as you still have targetted your ad try to experiment till you don't get little more satisfied....