Jen has news of a new feature on the Yahoo Publishers Network – ad category targeting – which allows publishers to assign categories of ads to their website. Publishers can choose two categories of ads to target per website/page/directory. This doesn’t mean contextual ads won’t be served – rather YPN explains:
‘Your ad category selections, in combination with our matching technology, will determine what types of ads will be displayed. Selecting ad categories for a Targeted URL, however, does not guarantee that only ads from those ad categories will appear.’
There are 20 categories with 134 sub categories to choose from (they seem open to suggestions for new categories).
This is a distinct feature of YPN and is very attractive to bloggers targeting niche topics. While I don’t know all the details of how to implement it as I’m not in the beta test still (not unless I’m willing to move continents) I can see some great possibilities with this. For example being able to target different categories on your blog would definitely be handy!
I’ll be interested to see what Google comes up with in this area. They already have the ability to target specific sections of your page for making your ads more contextual – but I’m pretty sure from talking to a few other publishers that they are also testing something similar to this feature. Time will tell.
There is more information on YPN’s category targeting at the YPN FAQ page.
Categories would be great. I get so many blog ads on my various blogs which range from technology, cricket, writing, humor and so on. Yet I reckon more than 50% of ads on my sites are for blogging. Very confusing for the reader who’s reading an article on Macs or cartoons or cricket – and chances of click thru… close to zero – from the wrong direction!
Gimme categories please, Google.
On a tangent – double check your website details when you post – I just discovered I’d somehow got an extra hard to spot “y” in mine. doh! wonder how long I been doing that?!
I’m in the beta — I haven’t utilized the feature yet, because my site is pretty broad. I figure for now I’ll just let the computer make its decisions.
But to implement, you enter the URL of the page you want targeted. If you want it on all of the pages, put it on your top domain — ie https://problogger.com. Or, you can specifiy directories / specific pages, up to 50. It doesn’t require a change to your code.
if i put yahoo ads on my site, would google get upset and stop sending my site traffic?
Thats very unlikely Dean.
Dean – that all depends if you put the ads on the same page or not. If you do, you are breaching your TOS and may be booted from the program, which means that yes, they will get upset and stop sending you ads. As long as the page only serves one or the other, though, then you should be all set.
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