If you run a company, advertising is essential to growing your customer base. It helps you get your brand out there and tells customers about your sales or deals.
However, just throwing ads onto the internet isn’t effective. You must ensure you’re targeting your ads at the right people to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
Yahoo Native, previously known as Yahoo Gemini, is one tool that can help advertisers reach consumers.
What is Yahoo Native?
Yahoo Native is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service from Yahoo.
The service began in the late 1990s as GoTo, the first company to provide pay-for-placement search services. In 1998, GoTo began offering advertisers the ability to bid the amount they were willing to pay to be placed at the top of search results.
The company rebranded as Overture in 2001 and was acquired by Yahoo, its top customer, in 2003.
Today, Yahoo Native helps companies drive customers to their websites by placing ads on their own websites and the websites of their publishing partners. This includes big names such as ESPN, ABC, Apple News, and MSN.
The service lets advertisers manage their entire campaign and multiple ad types from one place, making it easy to build effective campaigns.
Types of Ads Available on Yahoo Native
One of Yahoo Native top features is its ability to let advertisers manage multiple ad formats in one place. It also combines search advertising and native advertising within one service.
The ad formats available include:
Image
Video
App install
Carousel
Yahoo Mail
Moments
One important feature is the option to manage ads for tablets and mobile devices separately from desktop ads, allowing you to be even more granular with your strategy.
Who Should Use Yahoo Native?
Yahoo Native is a good fit for many types of businesses.
Companies That Want to Use Native Advertisements
Native advertising is a unique form of advertising that blends in with the surrounding content on the web page. It’s less intrusive, which helps it appear more trustworthy. This causes it to drive more clicks than other types of ads.
Yahoo Native focuses on native ads and gives advertisers many options for how to place their campaigns on partner sites. If you’re considering a native advertising campaign, you may want to try Yahoo Native.
Businesses Wanting a Results-Driven Campaign
Yahoo Native offers powerful reporting and tracking tools that you can use to keep an eye on your campaign’s performance and metrics. You can also use these reports to see what types of people are seeing your ads and clicking on them.
The platform excels when you have specific results or goals to target. You can use these reports to track your progress toward your goals and refine your targeting to reach those results.
Companies Needing Highly Targeted Ads
In addition to placing your ad campaigns on top websites, Yahoo Native lets you target specific demographics and types of consumers to ensure you get the best ROI for your advertising dollars.
You can use the service to target factors like user interests, age, location, other demographic information, and more.
Businesses That Want to Use Multiple Ad Formats
Yahoo Native excels when you provide a variety of content to use. It can handle many ad placements, including videos, images, carousels, app installs, and more.
If you’re looking for an easy place to manage all of these types of advertisements, Native fits the bill.
How to Create Ads in Yahoo Native
Creating an ad campaign in Yahoo Native is simple, but completing the process carefully is important to ensure your campaign is as effective as possible.
Select a Campaign Objective
Yahoo Native does best when it has a measurable goal to track. The first thing you’ll do when making an ad is select a goal, such as:
Driving app installs
Boosting brand awareness
Getting customers to visit your website
Encouraging customers to re-engage with your app
The selection you make here will drive the rest of the process.
Name Your Campaign and Select the Campaign Type
Give your campaign and name and decide if you want it to focus on search advertising, native ads, or both.
Define Your Target Audience
Yahoo Native lets you specify your target audience based on factors like:
Geographic location
Language
Type of device used
Time of day
Age
Gender
Interests
Choose a Budget
Set the budget for your ad campaign. You can choose daily or total, and you can scale this budget up or down later.
You’ll also select how you’ll track conversions.
Create an Ad Group
Within each ad campaign, advertisements are separated into groups. When you set up the group, you’ll determine its start date and the bid strategy you’ll use for the campaign.
Create Ad
Finally, you’re ready to set up advertisements. Native has you fill out a simple form to help create effective ads. You’ll provide a title, description, destination, and display URL. You’ll also provide any other assets that are required.
Then, add a list of keywords that you want to target. Once you’ve done that, you can launch the campaign.
Yahoo Native Reporting
One of the reasons why Yahoo Native is so powerful is its suite of reporting tools. You can leverage these tools to make your ads more impactful and effective.
You view reports for your ad campaigns, groups, and keywords from the dashboard. You can see things such as:
How many times have your ads displayed
How many people clicked on your ads
The install-click rate of your app if you’re trying to drive installs
The cost per user action
The average cost per click on your ad
You can even automate reporting by setting up daily or weekly report exports that get sent directly to your email.
Tips for Using Yahoo Native
To make the most of your Yahoo Native ad campaigns, use these tips.
Preview Your Ads
Yahoo Native lets you preview your advertisements and see how they’ll look before you publish them. Make sure to preview your advertisements to ensure they look correct.
Limit Video Ads to Fifteen Seconds or Less
Video advertisements are powerful. They are a great way to drive customer engagement and improve awareness and recall of your brand.
However, longer ads can annoy or distract users. Fifteen seconds or less is the sweet spot for effective video ads.
Leave Time for Optimization and Adjustments
Yahoo Native offers powerful automation and reporting tools, but it can’t use those tools to their full potential right away. Customers should wait at least two to four weeks to give them time to test their campaign fully and to start making optimizations.
Track Device Types
You can use the Audience cube report to get device information about the people who view your ads.
Yahoo Native lets you target your campaigns based on your potential customers' devices. This information can be highly valuable when you’re deciding about adjustments to your campaign.
Don’t Ignore Asset Types
Yahoo Native supports many ads, including text, images, and videos. The more asset types you feed into the system, the more places that Yahoo can share your advertisements.
If you ignore an asset type, you’ll be limiting the reach and impact of your campaign.
Follow the Asset Guidelines
Yahoo provides guidelines for different types of assets. For example, images should be about 1200x627 and have text that is easy to read. Videos should have ad titles, text, and call-to-action text.
Follow these guidelines to ensure your ads are effective, show up properly on websites, and don’t get pushed back to you for edits before getting published.
Don’t Discount Day Parting
Yahoo Native lets you target your ads to specific times of the day. This practice, called day parting, can be a great way to focus your ads and improve engagement.
Think about when your customers will most likely engage with your company. For example, if you’re selling takeout food, advertising right before mealtimes could be highly effective.
You can use Yahoo Native’s reporting tools to track when your ads are generating the most conversions. Then, consider a heavier focus on those times of the day.
