Are you looking for a way to expand your PPC reach this holiday season outside of AdWords, Bing or Facebook? What about Yahoo Stream Ads?? Yahoo released the newest native ad format back in April and has been evolving ever since. Yahoo Stream Ads helps connect advertisers with their consumers through the highly personalized content stream on Yahoo.com. Yahoo Is not dead my friends!
What Are Yahoo Stream Ads?
Yahoo stream ads are a form of a cost per click text ad with a small image (82×82 pixels) that is populated in the 3rd and 13th rank in a users organic content stream, and at the top of Yahoo mail inbox. Below are some sample Stream ads provided by Yahoo.
Yahoo’s algorithm determines if your ad is relevant to the users search history based off their interactions including: interests, social signals and Facebook Likes, click data across the entire Yahoo network. Stream Ads will format your ad to show across all devices. In additional to user’s search interests, Yahoo will also look at your bid, performance (CTR), location targeting and competition in the auction to determine when and where your ad shows up. The ads are now available across most of Yahoo sites including:
- Yahoo home page
- Yahoo Mail
- Yahoo News
- Yahoo Sports
- Yahoo Finance
- Yahoo omg!
- Yahoo Movies
- Yahoo TV
- Yahoo Music
- Yahoo Travel
- Yahoo Homes
- My Yahoo
Who Should Use Them?
Any ambitious PPC marketer that is looking to expand their reach and an opportunity pick up incremental traffic and conversions! If you have extra budget as you round out Q4 and are looking to make a big push this holiday season, give Yahoo Stream Ads a try. Yahoo Stream Ads would be a great opportunity for branding or direct response during this holiday season. Also, while Google still holds about 80% of search engine market, there are still a large number of people interacting with Yahoo.
In a study by a company called WebpageFX , which tracked search data for over 35,000,000 queries in 2012, found that of the 11.69% of search queries, the states that boasted the highest usage of Yahoo included: Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Ohio. Washington State has the lowest market share of Yahoo at just 4.16%. So if you target a product or service in the southern states and the Rust Belt region, you may have better luck with Yahoo in general.
How To Set Them Up:
- Login and Create an Account with Yahoo Stream Ads – https://streamads.yahoo.com/
- Create your first campaign and ad with step-by-step instructions. Or, upload as many ads and campaigns as your heart desires via a CSV file. Yahoo does not have a limit on the number of ads but recommends no more than 100.
- Ad Character Limits – Headline 50, Description 150, Sponsor 25. Image size recommendation is 82×82 pixels.
- Tracking – Since Yahoo Stream Ads does not offer conversion tracking in the UI. You will want to make sure your destination URLs include a 3rd party URL tracking system to track conversions such as Google Analytics UTM Params or Yahoo Web Analytics.
- Audience Targeting – Set your geo-targeting settings. You can also select to show your ads more based on gender if you choose.
- Set Bid – Minimum Bid .05. *Reporting suite will provide recommendations for bids once your campaign is live
- Set a Daily or Lifetime Budget
- Reporting Suite – Performance Metrics (Click, Costs, Impressions, CTR)
What are your thoughts about Yahoo Stream Ads? Have you had any significant wins or losses with them? I just launched my first campaign and am looking forward to reporting back more findings to you fine folks in the future.
