What You Told Us, and Advice from Yahoo! Team Members

Editor’s Note: Since September, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is a first in a series by Senior Insight Manager, Todd Lombardo, in which he will share some of your insights and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Configuration optimization
First up, let’s talk about optimization, or making changes to your ad listings to improve performance. In a question from September 2006, we asked how often you change ad format–one way to optimize–and the answers broke out as follows:

Q: How often do you change your ad format (color, size or placement)?

Surprisingly, almost half of you told us you never make changes. Additionally, some free-form responses noted that you only make changes reactively, after you “see a huge decrease in revenue,” or “rarely,” “twice a year” and “as little as possible.”

However, being proactive in optimization could lead to improved performance and greater revenue. Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at the Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that giving an ad format a chance to prove itself through comparison testing is a good way to see more positive results. She often counsels clients to test a category that is relevant to site users for a week, and then change to another relevant category for a second week, another for a third week, etc., and compare the results to work toward improvement.

There are two important reasons for doing this. One, by allowing a week, you give your category a chance to see if it works with your users. Two, better performance is not always in the most obvious categories; knowing your users can improve results. For example, news publication sites target high-end automobiles or investment ads to better target their demographics.

Optimizing Categories
In another poll question, we asked how many ad categories you’ve designated on your sites:

Q: How many different ad categories have you designated? 

Over half of you answered that you only designate a category at the site level. And through your free-form responses, some of you noted “1 or 2 per site”, “2 for entire site,” or “sometimes for certain pages.”

Cody Simms of Yahoo!’s Product Management team advises that focusing content development efforts at the individual page level rather than the site level could improve revenue performance with a contextual advertising program. Where possible, strive to make each web page oriented around a single specific topic. Our contextual ad engine performs best when a page has a clear topic associated with it.

Of course, the practicality of doing this all depends on the type of site that you run. If you are blogging, for example, you likely will not be adjusting the content on each page to fine-tune for contextual advertising. But if you are publishing product reviews or other forms of static content, this might work well for you.

Once you’ve focused content development at the individual URL level, you can then use our Reporting URLs or Reporting Categories feature to track performance for each specific page. Following our comparison testing example earlier, try making one small weekly adjustment to page content at a time and track your performance changes as a result.

For further insights into improving performance, Jennifer Slegg, a guest blogger back in May, had some good thoughts on optimization, as did our own Margaret Holland.

Are you optimizing more than our survey let on? Does the above advice ring true? What else do you think we should ask you about in our polls? Leave a comment and let us know!

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network