Forum Moderators: open
My site deals with various types of consumer electronics and technology.
These are my thoughts so far:
(1) Why the hell do their banner (468x60) and 1/2 banner ads have no text and just the headline link? I don't want ads that simply read "Free Shipping!" with no indication of what's being shipped? A called them and asked them what's going on with that and their reply was that they would look into it. I then got email that boiled down to, "that's the way we do it". Not good enough. Most of my ad space is in that format so it now excludes 90% of my site from Yahoo.
(2) Ad targeting (even with the page topic suggested) is poor. On a page about electronics I still get ads for dog walking and dating services.
(3) Even the targeted ads aren't very interesting to me or my viewers since CTR has dropped way off from AdSense
(4) Their reporting stats are inferior to AdSense.
(5) The saving grace is that the few clicks that I do get pay much higher than AdSense. Maybe 5x higher on average, so that with 1/5th the CTR I generate about the same revenue per page.
Overall I'm not very impressed, though I'd love to get the revenue per click that I'm getting from Yahoo on my Google ads!
They're going to have to do a hell of a lot better to move me away from AdSense, even though my AdSense revenue has been falling recently despite increasing traffic and the same CTR. I'm not very happy with AdSense because of falling revenue, but I'm even less happy with Yahoo because of their poor targeting, limited stats and lack of usable banner format ads.
I also use AdSense which does so much better. I was just trying out Yahoo on some minor pages to see how it would do. I think Yahoo must be having problems getting advertisers. They used to show ads that matched pretty well on most pages.
I asked what exactly 'hot' means? I told them it sounds like maybe #*$!ty or horny and I wanted that ad removed immediately... it is still there.
Agreed... I've also complained about this numerous times.
>>>That IMO is the biggest problem...inventory...
Disagree. I see they have the correct inventory, it just doesn't seem to be able to show on the correct page a lot of times. i.e. my page about limes shows ads for oranges, while my page for oranges shows ads about apples. Of course, sometimes my page for lemons shows ads about designer shoes... targeting relevancy is their biggest hurdle atm, not inventory from my tests.
>>>they have improved in a way that now in 2 different Ad unit at least i can see different Ads
Seems I need to run a test again then. Last we checked, we were still getting the same ad in two ad units of the same size on the same page. Thanks for the tip.
The thing to remember is that YPN is in beta. They most certainly have issues. One of the tradeoffs for being a beta publisher is that you are the lucky one to experience them. Test, submit problems and give examples and remember that thousands of other people are doing the same thing and it takes time to hit all the issues. What seems like a simply rectified issue with your one website gets a bit more complicated when there are thousands of those issues to deal with. My two cents...
I know they are in Beta but the "hot singles" went over the line. I can't risk beta testing with stuff like that. I don't care what they mean by 'hot'. I know what most people think. Do we know if it's really a legit dating service?
An alternative to AdSense is needed, but so far Yahoo isn't it.
Unless things improve as soon as the few pages I have Yahoo on have generated the $100 minimum, I'll be inclinded to pull the Yahoo ads and put the AdSense back.
Why they don't put text in the banner ads amazes me. It should be something any decent programmer can do in a couple of minutes over a cup of coffee.
"This responds to your question about the ads display.We confirm that we changed the stucture for this ads early October 2006.
The smallest ad units (234 x 60 & 468 x 60) will no longer display a
description.We are sorry about any inconvenience."
I took this as "that's the way it is", despite an earlier comment from them on the phone that they were "looking into it". What that apparently meant was the rep I spoke to didn't know and would "look into it".
So I get stuck with an ad which displays " - Free Shipping", with no text and no reason on earth for anyone to be interested in clicking on it. That's not exactly going to get me to use more Yahoo ads.
Yes Yahoo, I'd certainly describe it as an "inconvenience".
I'm now getting ads for Horse Farm Insurance and Breast Augmentation Surgery on a page about consumer electronics.
Makes my site look cheap and nasty. Not good at all.
And yes, I've specified the category for ads, so it's not just depending on reading the page content right (which it clearly doesn't do). AdSense never had any problems with this page.
