On Monday, Yahoo released their new display advertising for small and large businesses. Yahoo’s display advertising program is identical to Google with a few twists. You can target your display ads geographically, demographically, and within specific content network placements. The funny thing about Yahoo’s new display advertising is that it’s not connected to your Yahoo sponsored search account – mainly because you don’t have to have a Yahoo sponsored search account to advertise via display ads.
It’s easy to track the performance of your display ads to. You can get daily reporting on impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, spend, etc. You can set a daily campaign budget for each display advertising campaign, with a $30 per day minimum.
There are two pricing models, one for CPC (cost-per-click) and the other is CPM (cost-per-impressions). I’m not entirely sure why people would want to pay just for people to look at their ad with the CPM model, I’d rather only pay when someone clicks on my ad which is the CPC model just like regular Yahoo search marketing.
If you’re nervous about the creative aspect of your display advertising, Yahoo has a solution. It’s pretty cool actually – you can choose from several different business categories, and Yahoo will provide you with many different display ad design templates that you can easily edit and make your own. In the screen shot below, I selected the retail business category, and you can see the different templates Yahoo offers. What’s cool is that they also give you the impression count and click-through rate for each template. So you can choose your design based off past performance of that template.
Once you’ve chosen your ad design template, you can customize it with your information, logo, pictures and ad copy.
Now that I have customized my ad with my own logo, images, copy, etc. It shows me a preview of what my ads would look like in all sizes offered.
The next screen allows you to enter your destination URL of your ads. You can enter separate destination URL’s for each separate ad or just one destination URL for all of your ads. If you’re running analytics, don’t forget to add tracking to your destination URL!
To finish up your Yahoo display ads, you must select your budgeting, CPC or CPM bid, targeting, and industry. Yahoo provides a list of industries in which you can advertise your ads on. You can select several industries at the same time which is nice.
The only bad thing about the budgeting is that Yahoo will recommend a CPC based on my ads and industries I targeted, and I couldn’t bid below that recommendation – which really isn’t a recommendation but a requirement to get your ads to run. What’s even worse is that the recommended CPC for my specific ad was $3.79! But you can set a daily budget and they will not exceed that daily budget. Again, the minimum daily budget can’t be any lower than $30/day.
To submit your campaign and begin running your ads, you have to create an account and submit your credit card information. Or you can save your campaign as a draft and come back to it later.
I think the overall process is super easy and anyone can create an ad with their templates. You don’t target via keywords which could yield potentially unqualified traffic. However they do offer reporting so if you find there are sites that are spending too much and not converting you can remove those sites.
I think it’s a step in the right direction for Yahoo – let’s just hope it actually drives some good conversions!
