Ad placement tips

“It really depends on what you’re trying to do,” says Margaret Holland, when asked about optimal ad placement. A senior account manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, Margaret helps publishers get the most out of the Network. “From a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a ‘leaderboard’ above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.”

But not everyone wants to be that up-front with their advertising. Some prefer to place their ads in less-obvious but still eye-catching places. Eye tracking studies (like the ones cited here and here) have shown that people tend to look at the top-center or top-left of a site first, then track to the right and down the right side, slanting back up across the page to just below the upper-left corner and down the left side – all in an instant.

In general, Margaret has a found that the second most active placement in terms of click-throughs tends to be the right-hand rail or margin. “Skyscrapers” and vertical banners do well when placed next to the content in the main body.

Square and rectangle ads placed within the center column also do well, provided they are placed in context to the content. Ads placed below the fold tend to perform least well, although that isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. If you have some useful functionality or eye-catching media near the footer, that may be a good place to put an extra ad unit. Bear in mind, however, that when pairing ads with media or images, it must be apparent to the user that the media is not a part of the ad. Placing images next to ad units can be construed at an “inducement to click,” and goes against Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Terms and Conditions.

“Each site is different, and each publisher has different goals,” Margaret notes. “Publishers should experiment with different placement, layouts, Reporting Categories and Ad Targeting combinations to achieve the best outcome.” 

 – Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Yahoo! Search Marketing enhancements to benefit publishers, as well as advertisers

Today Yahoo! Search Marketing officially announced a significant initiative to improve search monetization capabilities.

The new, enhanced search ad platform that we will introduce in Q3 will enable advertisers to more easily connect with consumers, and will allow them to focus on developing more creative and strategic marketing campaigns. We are hopeful that the end result of this new advertiser platform will be more relevant and engaging advertisements on your Web pages, with the goal of driving highly qualified clicks and enhanced monetization. 

We have conducted extensive testing with advertisers during the design of the new system, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

We’re excited about the new advertiser experience features and system enhancements, and we are confident that these changes will benefit all of our customer audiences. As advertisers make deeper and more effective use of the new platform, we anticipate an enhanced user experience and improved monetization for our publishers. 

What do you, as a part of the Yahoo! Publisher Network, need to do to enjoy these benefits? Nothing at all. When the new search ad platform launches this Fall, we expect our publishers to begin seeing the improvements mentioned above. Of course, we encourage you to continue to optimize and refine your ad targeting and formatting to take full advantage of the changes.

What others are saying

Naturally, the Yahoo! Search Marketing announcement has caused buzz in the blogosphere and beyond. The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC have published stories. Meanwhile, Loren Baker says “Say hello to the new Yahoo! Search Marketing,” and over at Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch, they’re chatting us up. For our Spanish language fans, click aqui.

- The Team

Daily NewsGrok

These days, Yahoo!’s got a bucket of blogs. There’s so many, in fact, it’s hard to keep up with all that’s going on. Fortunately, there’s a real grassroots effort inside Yahoo!, as well as by individual Yahoo!s themselves, to help you get the information you need.

Last week we introduced you to the Y! Cool Thing of the Day Blog. Today we bring you Planet Yahoo! Started by Carlo Zottmann, a 32-year-old local market engineer at Yahoo! in Munich, Germany, Planet Yahoo! aggregates all of Yahoo!’s blogs, official and unofficial, as well as other Yahoo!-related Web properties, via RSS.

“There’s a lot of great Yahoo! stuff out there,” says Carlo Zottmann, 32, publisher of this unofficial blog. “But sometimes we don’t do enough to get the word out. I started Planet Yahoo! to help do that.”

If you want to keep up with the latest, be sure to subscribe to Planet Yahoo!’s RSS feed.

Picture’s worth a thousand words

In case you missed our Intro Video the day we launched the blog, it now has a permanent home on our About page, along with audio files of some our key team members. Or see the Video now.

Help!

You sometimes need some. We all do. To help you get the Yahoo! Publisher Network help you need, we’ve added a permanent link to Customer Support in the right hand margin.

Daily NewsGrok

The news is that del.licio.us and Flickr have teamed up so that bookmarks on del.licio.us that point to pics on Flickr will now show the Flickr thumbnail, so you can preview the photo before you click on the link.  In addition, del.licio.us has launched a new feature called “your network,” which allows you to create a network of del.licio.us pals and then keep track of their latest public bookmarks, as well as share your own. For more, check out the del.licio.us blog.

And see what Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal thinks of it all.

Daily NewsGrok 

Y! Cool Thing of the Day?
It’s true. At least one cool thing comes out of Yahoo! just about every day. To help you keep up on the latest, some of the louder yodelers at Yahoo! built, on their own time, the completely unofficial and irreverent Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day Blog.

Sweet Caroline
What do Yahoo! Publisher Network team members get up to after a long day of manning the booth at Webmaster World in Boston? One word: Sox! 

As noted on certain message boards, some publisher accounts have been recently closed. These account closures were based solely on traffic quality issues.

Yahoo! Publisher Network is still an invite-only beta program. As such, we’re constantly refining the procedures and policies that will help maintain a quality network for our publishers and advertisers. And we won’t release the product to the general publishing community until we are able to serve our constituent’s needs well.

This is a learning experience for everyone, one of the main concerns for our 100,000-plus advertisers who participate is the quality of traffic they receive. For advertisers, we need to consider the source of traffic, the site content, click activity, and the overall quality of leads generated for our advertisers.

As publishers you are also concerned with quality – the quality and relevance of the ads you receive and how well they monetize on your sites.

If you have questions, the Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Terms and Conditions very specifically lay out the dos and don’ts of employing the Network’s ads. Please note there really is a lot of important, need-to-know information here. Be sure to review our Ts&Cs.

Maintaining the quality of our Network is vital to the success of everyone involved.

Thanks for reading and for helping us build the best contextual advertising network out there.

– Willan Johnson, Vice President and General Manager

Get Yahoo! Search on Your Sites
Employing a Yahoo! Search box allows your users to find exactly what they’re looking for, quickly and easily. The Yahoo! Search Box in the right-hand column of this blog is one of four configurations, all of which you can deploy easily on your own site. Each configuration is designed to meet your spatial needs – according to the layout of your site – and your specific search needs.

Some publishers need site search as well as Web search, while others only need a way to allow their users a convenient way to search the Web from their site. Yahoo! offers two layout options for each search type:

Style 1: This box is ideal if you just want a basic Web search that fits well into a header or footer. 

Style 2: Also good for headers and footers, this box offers Web and site search.

Style 3: This box works well in margins.

Style 4: Also good for margins, this box offers Web and site search.

Adding Yahoo! Search to your site is even easier than adding Yahoo! Publisher Network ads. You don’t have register or be a Yahoo! account owner. Simply go to the Add Yahoo! Search page, choose the search option that best fits your needs, and copy and paste the code provided into your own site:

Placement Tip

You’ll notice that on our blog, the search box is placed in the upper right-hand margin. It has become a Web usability convention that search functionality is placed in the upper right, above the fold. This is our recommendation, but publishers are free to place search boxes anywhere they see fit.

More on the Way

There are things afoot in the Yahoo! Search world that we can’t devulge fully just yet. But look for significant improvements in Yahoo! Search Box options and features sooner rather than later.

Currently, the Search Box is not monetized, but is a useful add-on to your site. Yahoo! is working hard on a monetization solution for Search, however, which you can expect to see in the not-to-distant future. Be sure to stay tuned to the blog for the latest updates.
 

– The Team

Blog Updates & Enhancements

You’ve probably noticed that here at the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog, we like to use a lot of Yahoo! features. If not, look at the right-hand margin (psst! that way →), and scroll up and down. You’ll notice (among other things):

• A Flickr badge that links to photos that our team has taken at various events, and around our Burbank campus.
• An Upcoming.org badge, where we invite you to attend our future events.
• A del.cio.us Tag Cloud, which takes you to our shared links and bookmarks.

In addition, you’ll also notice (on the top of this post) Bookmark, Send and Blog via 360º actions buttons.

(BTW - If you’ve come to this article via your RSS feed, which takes you directly to the permalink page, you won’t see the features in the right margin that we’re talking about. For that, you’ll have to visit the home page.)

Publishers have asked how they can take advantage of these and other features on their own blogs and Web sites. Luckily, they’re open to all Yahoo! (and even non-Yahoo!) users at no charge. Most are pretty easy to implement.

In response, we’ve added a page to the blog that gives you a little more context around these features and provides links to Yahoo! pages where you can get more information and instructions. You’ll find a permanent link to the page in the right margin.

In addition to the features on this page, Yahoo! offers lots of others to help you build the best content experience you can for your users with the least effort and cost. These include:

• Y! Q – Search results contextual to your content
• Affiliate Programs – Earn extra income with these programs
• Finance, Maps, Hotjobs, Weather – RSS Feeds and APIs that deliver content right to your site

From time to time we’ll be publishing tips on how to best use Yahoo! features.

Tomorrow: How and Why to Add the Yahoo! Search Box.

— The Team

Making Web 2.0 more fun than a barrel of sock monkeys

Alex Welch

Darren Crystal
Co-founders
Photobucket.com

You might have heard some of this “Web. 2.0” buzz. While it’s supposed to be everywhere these days, even the technorati sometimes have a hard time coming up with a concise definition – usually they murmur something nebulous about “Web sites behaving like applications.”  According to Wikipedia, “Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online… ” Yawn!

Maybe Wikipedia should just post a link to this week’s Publisher Spotlight instead. The best way to explain Web 2.0 is by example and Photobucket is a great place to start. It’s a Web service that allows you to upload, store and publish visual digital media – such as photos and video – to any site. It’s like having your own image database, server and media publishing software without the expense or the learning curve. In fact, the image at left was uploaded, resized, stored and published using my own Photobucket account. It took about 37 seconds.

Alex Welch, 29, and Darren Crystal, 35, a pair of engineering gear heads out of the Internet backbone sector, started Photobucket back in 2003 and have spent most of the last three years fine tuning it while watching it grow exponentially. The company now boasts 35 employees and, with 15 million members and with 50 billion image requests monthly, was awarded “Fastest Growing Site” by Nielsen / Netratings in 2005.

Advertising – along with premium subscription services – is key to helping Photobucket be as successful in the boardroom as it is with its users, and Alex and Darren consider contextual advertising an important part of the company’s long-term strategy. They’ve taken advantage of our Network’s Ad Targeting ability, as well as our customer support, to implement Photobucket’s ad serving solution.

Pioneering efforts like Alex and Darren’s are transforming the Web from what for a long time seemed like a giant product brochure into a truly useful, fluid and personal new medium that promises to bring people together, help them communicate, create, collaborate and do business in new and exciting ways – and for less investment than ever before. That’s what Web 2.0 is really about, and contextual advertising is playing a major role in helping its pioneers achieve success.

I wonder what folks like Alex and Darren have in mind for Web 3.0?

Know a publisher who would make a good Spotlight? Send us your nominations. 

– Michael Mattis, Blog Editor