Well I think I have given Yahoo a fair test at this point. I will still keep it on a few miscelaneous pages, but I am yanking it completely off my test site. While the clicks are good, my click-through rate is next-to-nothing and the ad inventory for the two different sites I have tested it on are only abouy 5% relevant. Comparing September and October I am seeing a 300% increase in unique visitors and a 500% decrease in revenue. Perhaps I will find another site down the line to use Yahoo on that has a relevant inventory for my site.. For now thought, I just don't see it working well for me on most of my sites. Like I said, I still have a few placements on a few sites, and will keep an eye on them... but for now I have swapped many of my yahoos back to adsense, and have also been upping my chitika representation as well.
its good that you get to test yahoo ads. i cant even get to sign-up. we need to have varied source of income, not really having all apples in one basket. is that correct? it is not yet popular with advertisers, perhaps when it gets a lot of attention the clicks would really jack up.
Yeah I like the diversity.. There is no one size fits all. I find different tools work for different sites and different pages on different sites. I am sure there are places where Yahoo works better.. I Just haven't found any of those places yet. It is funny, I just added chitika on top of my ads on my test site and the amount of money I have made compared to Yahoo in a fraction of the time is ridiculous. Will be interesting to see what happens with adsense since I have switched back. I enjoy diversity, but having no ads is as diverse as having yahoo for me right now.. So I will have to wait until I determine an opportunity to use yahoo on different pages.
aeiouy, that's a very, very important point. When people originally jumped on the Adsense bandwagon they abandoned all attempts at diversity in order to maximise their income. It's about time we publishers had a range of ad programs that allow us to split risk without losing revenue. Like you, I've had good results with Chitika (so good, in fact, that I made the site in my signature). I've added your quote to my Chitika feedback page (if you don't mind).
I experimented with Yahoo! and Chitika for my header banner. Yahoo! sucked and I dumped them, Chitika does quite well. My CTR is good because of the keyword feature so I get to target items that I know my users will be interested in.
Yeah if Google are Yahoo are smart, they will figure out ways to incorporate that aspect of chitika without allowing it to be mis-used. Honestly, if I could go through the adsense or yahoo inventory and pick which advertisers I wanted, I gurantee you I would outperform the automatic selections. Problem is not everyone would and you might end up with people just tracking down the highest paying stuff. Will see what happens with Chitika in that regard. I do enjoy going through and finding relevant products for ads on sites I use chitika on.
I agree that diversity in your ads is really key to good click through success. That's one of the reasons I use Revenue Pilot on so many sites -- you can program in a number of key words so the ads will be mixed up. Also nice you can compare the price range for various key words so you can use the most profitable mix.
I had the same relevency issues. I decided to use specific targeting from yahoo, in essence I'm forcing a particular genre to display. Results... even though the ads are completely off topic to the site I'm displaying them on, my website income has gone through the roof comparatively. I have logged 2x the income in one month with Yahoo than I had in 6+ months of targeted AS income combined. I'm talking hundreds. I guess what I'm saying is, look for the high paying click ads from Y! and have them display, don't give up. Oh and that % I stated is with 50/50 AS-Y! done with a randomizer and only 75-150 uniques a day. J
I messed with that too.. but the closet target groups were still too far off to really give me any level of clicks. After I mull it over a bit, I will probably redeploy it on a few more pages, but I messing with other things right now.
I have to say I wasnt impressed with the yahoo ads. At first I got excited because the revenue per click was gigantic on the limited pages I showed them. I decided to run them on my main pages and the revenue did a complete reversal, not to mention the ads were simply not a good fit for my site.
I have some domains that are underperforming already on google. I'm putting those on YPN just to keep my "foot in the door" so to speak. I'll do some tests now and again to see if Yahoo does better in certain areas, but right now I have not been impressed. It doesn't seem like they are aggressively competing with Adsense, does it?