Cannot Get Targeted Ads

New Publisher - 5 days

[Edge]

I have been publishing YPN ads on my home page only for five days. I have yet to see any ads that are remotely close to my content (I'm getting mortgage and phone ads on a engineering site). I tried the Ad targeting feature and got rental car ads for the UK and Costa Rica.

I have emailed support, they responded with a almost generic reply indicating that they are testing various technologies.

I just talked to a person, and they where not very helpfull, however they where polite.

How long does it normally take for them to get it together?

[garyr_h]

Depends. They are still in BETA, so you never know. YPN hasn't even been in BETA for too long. However, I have noticed that my site is getting a lot better ads since about Friday (I've been a member since around September 27th).

Ad targetting helped out a little and they say wait 3-4 days at least before that takes full effect (well.. that's what I was told).

You get this sort of stuff happening with BETA products. It's not perfect, if it was it wouldn't be in BETA.

[nealw]

I have been getting better results by NOT selecting one of there "target categories"...

I have been beta testing for about a week. Each day targeting gets a little better, though I am still receiving a number of way off target ads as well (lots of phone ads here too).

[Edge]

After six days, still no on-target ads. I am sure glad I did not turn them loose on my whole site.

[krod]

use the targeting ad option they have, not just one for the entire site, but different for each page. That way you can get more diverse ads.

[SamOwen]

I'm having the same problem and then some. I call my forums "message boards" and I have a forum called "photo albums". 99% of my ads are for products that have to do with boards and "photo albums"... very irrelevant. I hope Yahoo! gets a keyword feature where you can turn certain keywords off and on. I think this would save the advertisers some money too on CPM. Right now I'd like to disable the keywords "boards" and "photo albums"...

[ann]

What they really need is to get some advertisers.

Then you could show ads to the world instead of just the USA.

[garyr_h]

Ann, Overture has a wide variety of advertisers. The problem is not the selection. As for showing Ads to places outside the USA... I doubt Yahoo! would want to do that at the moment when publishers are limited to within the United States.

[frankybme]

Ann Yhaoo and Google are the 2 biggest in the game. Yahoo has more than enough ads for every topic. The proble, is they are still working on the targeting system they have. I notice sometimes its working great and then you look again and the targeting sucks. Anybody else notice this?

[garyr_h]

frankybme, I've definately seen this across my domain. Sometimes there's even a huge difference between the ads currently shown and when pressing 'refresh'; suddenly the targetting gets better.

The targetting does seem to be better than what it was a few weeks ago, however improvement must still be made.

[Edge]

I have placed YPN ads on a very keyword rich page. With that, I am seeing the same as garyr_h on targeting (good ads most of the time, somtimes better with a page refreash). Complex pages, which the subject or content is not brutally obvious to Yh, you will only get the generic ads.

[ownerrim]

It's incredibly hard to believe that overture/yahoo pioneered any of this contextual ad technology because it sure doesn't show.