Sigh, I keep flip flopping between YPN (which pays better) and Adsense (which targets better). I have a lot of dynamic pages that Google chokes on displaying ads when they're generated. Yahoo at least displays ads, but on wildly untargeted topics, even with ad targeting enabled. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to keep YPN on topic? I've gone back to Google for the third time now even though it pays less because at least my car site displays car ads instead of Airplane ads.
personally I would go with whatever pays more. not pays more per click, but pays more when it comes to the bottom line. as for targetting, you can use the category targetting within YPN, although I'm guessing you're aware of that? apart from that all you can do is wait until YPN gets their software tweaked to display more relevant ads.
Yeah I pick my targeted category, although it's not granular enough for me. For one site YPN pays MUCH better than Adsense and is reasonably targeted. But for this car site it's all over the place. It pays better CPC but the CTR drops through the floor. I really wonder what they're currently focused on refining right now while in beta. I'm assuming their payout will drop when they leave beta and become more in line with Adsense. But if that happened today they'd lose alot of publishers. The cash is the only thing attractive about YPN right now.
the CPC and the CTR, at the end of the day, do not matter. what matters is how much money you generate. go with whatever one generates you more money. this will likely vary from site to site or even from sections of a site to other sections of the same site.
try to target most of the categories[except some] under Automative Ad Category on YPN, and see which one pays best & target ads better... [give each category atleast 4-5 days. Don't change categories quickly before they start targetting]
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'll try YPN again next Monday and try to leave it alone for a week. We'll see how well things zero in...
i've tried the targeting by page, and still on several pages i get totally unrelated ads.. some pages are well targeted, most are not.. no matter what i do.. Adsense targets these pages perfectly, but of course pay wayyyy less...
If the content of the pages changes frequently yahoo will have a hard time targeting. In that case, just use adsense.
im not sure how your dynamic pages are setup. but here is a little trick i have used in the past, though i dont do it anymore because it is too much work. if your page is whatever.php and that content is changing or is dynamically created. what i have done, is to manually build a page called whatever.php with the content that i believe will draw the ads i want. i upload it and get it to target, based off my content. i leave it up there and refresh to get the page to stick the targetting. then i delete the page. when my visitor calls on whatever.php and the site inserts its dynamic content, the ads are still targetted to the original targetting. ypn doesnt retarget very well on the fly. it takes time for it to lose targetting and then give a new targetting. of course, this is a pain in the butt. thats why i dont do it. better things to do than trick ypn targetting engine. jmo, not even sure if this works anymore, though i dont see why not
Giving the search engine (or in this case the YPN bot) another page and then switching it for human visitors is still cloaking in my book. Since you do it by hand and permanently, it can be argued that thats not the correct word for it, but you can also argue its just a really sh***y implementation. Taking your suggestion one step further would mean to keep showing the YPN bot the other page and your visitors the real one and we are at what we commonly call cloaking.
oook. to clarify; if you have a page, search.php and that page has dynamic content (content that is changing for whatever reason, like a search results page), ypn may have trouble targetting the page because of lack of content or constantly changing content. what i was saying is that you can create a static page called search.php, put content on it, get it to target and then delete the static page. when your visitor, in this example, does a search and hits your dynamic search page (search.php), the ads will maintain their targetting (for a little while). cloaking is showing the search engines (or whatever ip's) one thing and your users another. when the page is loaded again, the ypn bot is looking at the same page the user is (reason targetting will fail again). all im saying is that you can pretarget a page. after that, the bots and users are seeing the same exact page. so, its not cloaking, its pretargetting. jmo
Yahoo definately is in need of a serious overhaul in their 'targeting'. And I seriously hope it's sometime soon.