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.
