I have been up all night trying to get YPN targeting to work. What an incredible exercise in frustration. Here goes. I have a page about cholesterol. I put up the YPN code, and got excellent ads immediately, without using the so-called "targeting" feature. Here are the ads I got - Lower Cholesterol Naturally Lower Cholesterol Reduce High Cholesterol Apollolipids: Cholesterol Lowering PERFECT! ABSOLUTELY PERFECT! YES, THE ADS EXIST!!! Then I refresh, and I get - Flowers - Fat Women Pictures - Credit Cards - Online College Degrees over and over, never to see the great initial ads again, no matter how many refreshes. So, then I figure I must need to use the "targeting" feature. I select Health and Beauty main category, and Medical Conditions as a subcategory, the closest I could find. I immediately get medical ads all right, but TOTALLY UNRELATED to cholesterol - Lap Band Surgeons Asthma Wheelchair Epilepsy Knee Pain over and over, never to see the great initial ads again, no matter how many refreshes. What is the point of "targeting", if BETTER ads are served WITHOUT it? So, then I go back and remove the "targeting", and I get - FTD High Speed Internet Online College Degree alternating about 60/40 with the good ads. This stuff is enough to drive me nuts. It is so inconsistent, so unpredictable, it is as if the YPN engineers are TRYING to serve poor ads. Are you giving us effed up cookies? What's going on? They remind me of what Google frequently does - try to be TOO CLEVER. YPN needs to get over to Google, reach deep into their pocket, and hire away somebody who knows what the he|| they are doing. Publishers want targeted ads ALL THE TIME, not just sometimes. YPN currently has NO CLUE! They serve perfect ads at first, and then lose their minds. Until YPN fixes this, they are hopelessly relegated to a distant #2 spot behind Google. No matter how many high-paying UNRELATED ads they serve up, VERY FEW people are going to click on them. Where is your revenue going to come from, when CTR cannot rise from the basement? This experiment proves to me that this is NOT AN INVENTORY ISSUE. It is a "trying to be too clever" issue, of going from perfect to "dead stupid" in milliseconds, ON PURPOSE. Sorry for the strong words. After 6 hours of this cr@p, I've about had it. YPN, please tell me what I have to do, to get 100% appropriate ads like Google. There. I feel better now. AHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhg. I'm going to bed
Seems to me that in high paying niches the targeting is working great. In lower paying niches I am getting all those RON ads. That medical conditions category is worthless. I gave that a try and gave up in frustration. For reference - I am getting good targeting for real estate sites - not when I choose "real estate" - but when I choose "travel - vacation destinations".
Problem with YPN is that their advertising bot (YahooYSM) is much less active than Google's (Mediapartners-Google/2.1). Therefore they don't have much data about the actual content of your pages. All info they have about your page is what's accessible via JavaScript, and that's not too much - the Title and the URL are the only document properties in JavaScript that can give you a hint at the content. So, if you have a keyword-ladden page that has a neutral (or confusing) title tag and an URL like http://www.yourhost.com/111/222/333.htm, there is not too much info you are giving YPN to expect any relevancy back. It will be grossly irrelevant until the next time YahooYSM gets around and actually indexes the page, which can easily be never This, of course, is not to say that Yahoo relevancy does not suck in general largely due to much smaller pool of advertisers 'cause it does suck. I am taking great care of URLs and title tags on all my sites, and still I see vonages and florists all over the place whenever I use YPN.
You should expect Ad Targetting to give you general ads in the categories you select. That's just the way it works. Semantically targetted ads, general Ad Targetting category ads, and RON ads are all considered for display on a page. In this case, it appears that we believe that the Ad Targetting ads will perform best on your site. "being too clever" is not the cause of the variation in ads you see. The system is in beta, and we are actively experimenting with a variety of algorithms with the goal of find the best ways of providing effective ads to publishers.
kscaldef - We? Cool. Thank you. I didn't know you were here. I just went back and read your other 2 posts, with a whole new attitude and healthy respect. A hearty welcome to the forum. Just what the doctor ordered. It's just that when one tries so hard, so long, in good faith, and doesn't get anywhere, one can become frustrated beyond belief. Let me emphasize that you serve me perfectly apt targeted ads the first time. The "first cut" of the algo seems to work just fine. It is the subsequent rehashes (cleverness, flipping more "what if" switches, that produce subsequent consistently inferior results. "You should expect Ad Targetting to give you GENERAL ADS in the categories you select. That's just the way it works." By this, are you confirming another poster's alleged conversation with a YPN advisor that "It would be best to disable the RON ads"?, and also - "It would be best NOT to use ad targeting, it only gives GENERAL ADS"?, which leads to - "Just let the "built-in targeting algo" run to get the best targeted ads"? (Avoid "targeting tools", and block all RON ads) If the RON ads are disabled, will total revenue go up or down? Does the higher payout offset the lower CTRs? Will a chicken cross the road? ------ So now we know that there are 3 "Types" of ads - "(1) Semantically targetted ads, (2) general Ad Targetting category ads, and (3) RON ads are all considered for display on a page. In this case, it appears that we believe that the Ad Targetting ads will perform best on your site." Well, it turns out that (2) Ad Targeting category ads are far too general to effect a high CTR, as has been reported by many. The (3) RON ads are never appropriate for me, as I expect it is for many others. The (1) semantically targetted ads are the only ones that I ever want to see. You serve them on the first refresh (of all time), and thereafter you only serve them sometimes. Your competition, G, does an excellent job of consistently serving highly targeted ads. I think that you should try for this sooner rather than later. It does seem to be the greatest YPN issue, from reading webmaster forums. I would like to see the same 4 best ads shown constantly, per G. Rotation with inferior ads is not desired. "being too clever" is not the cause of the variation in ads you see. The system is in beta, and we are actively experimenting with a variety of algorithms with the goal of find the best ways of providing effective ads to publishers." I think that "being too clever" is EXACTLY the cause of the variation in ads I see. You CAN serve the best ads, but you DON'T. Thank you very, very, very much for your discourse. Any and all comments are welcomed and appreciated. Some of us are starved for clues, and strive only to do our best for ourselves, and Yahoo, as well.
Apparently, there is also a fourth type of ad, but I have never seen one. If one does a mouseover on the "question mark box" next to the Clicks" column in the report, the following text is displayed - "A click is recorded when a user clicks on an ad displayed on a publisher's page. Clicks on Public Service Announcements (PSAs) do not add to the Clicks total displayed in the Performance Repoort." I assume that these ads pay no money, just as with Google. Unlike Google however, is the fact that Google DOES add PSA impressions to the "Clicks total", hence the strong motivation to get rid of them. No money, PLUS diluted stats is a double whammy. Also, if one does a mouseover on the "question mark box" next to the Clicks" column in the report, the following text is displayed - "Click-Through Rate. This is the AVERAGE number of clicks that an ad receives divided by the number of times that the ad unit is displayed. CTR is equal to (Clicks)/(Page Impressions." Why is the word "Average" in the sentence? Average of what? Shouldn't it read EXACT number of clicks, divided by the EXACT number of impressions? Thank you for your time. .
kscaldef- It's been 4 days now. Do you just do "drivebys" on the easy ones? You are going to need a tougher skin than that. .
Surf_Dude, Thanksgiving? At any rate, I can't advise you on what techniques will work best on your site and your audience. It's not even clear to me exactly what your goals as a publisher are based on your posts. I can tell you that, on average, blocking ads will lower revenue. We don't run PSAs any more, instead RON ads have largely taken their place. Our systems can't immediately recognize when they selected "good" ads for a page. They're computers, not humans. It takes some time to experiment and gather data to decide what works best in what situations. During the beta period, we are trying lots of things, some of which work better than others. During this period, one request might use totally different algorithms than the next. As we learn what works best, more and more requests will use the best performing algorithms.
Thanksgiving, yes, of course. Quite unfair of me. Not everyone is a mad dog such as myself. My goal is revenue maximization. And I understand that it's all beta right now. I will keep listening and trying. Thank you for your additional inputs.
I'm getting mostly ads that have no relation to my site... It's a forum site, and I don't think the YPN spider has been on the site at all, I'll have to check the logs. I've got a user on the site who uses the name "Sargent D". Every once in a while I get a block of ads for "Find Elizabeth A Sargent", "Sargent Areaguide", "Sargent - Yahoo Shopping" and "Sargent on eBay". But most of the time I get ads for Vonage, Lending Tree, LowerMyBills and Nextag. This is on a phpBB forum. I used to run YPN on a vBulletin forum (on a different domain) and every time a page was displayed I'd see the YPN spider in the active users list. I haven't seen it at all on phpBB.
Ok, I checked the logs and found that the YPN spider IS coming around (I was looking for the wrong agent). But I was still getting ads that had nothing to do with my content, so I've removed YPN for the time being and have gone back to Adsense.
Well I'm about to get rid of YPN! all together. First off ads aren't even displaying on my homepage and ads that are displaying on my usb-pages are TOTALLY irrelavent. Out of 2593 impressions I have 5 clicks. Even now I don't know if they were out of pitty or what? I just might switch back to relevant Google ads where yes, I get like 3 - 10 cents per click, but I get a lot more clicks also. So should I give YPN! more time or should I give-up and just wait until they better their Ad System?
I gave up on it for the same reason as you-- I'll take my $0.03-0.05 clicks that are content-relevent vs. the very few $1.15 clicks that have absolutely no bearing on the content... If I didn't have multiple google units per page, I'd surely setup YPN as an 'alternative ad' setting, tho... -- Derek
Smart pricing has kicked in for one of my main income site. I decided to try ypn for this site. And yes, Yahoo ads are still not relevant at all. Well, i might give the site 2-3 days and if it's earning less than AS, i will switch back for that site.
You need to keep detailed logs on any targeting. This means you can't just toss the whole thing because the ads don't match your context. In many cases, the CTR actually increases when the ads are not matching context. I typically journal my findings for a few days after any changes.