You and your users should see fewer duplicate ads starting today

The word “dupe” has some interesting connotations. One the one hand it can mean a person who is “easily deceived or fooled,” and on the other it is simply shorthand for “duplicate”—in broadcast lingo, a copy of a videotape used to be called a dupe.

In our world, a dupe is simply an ad that appears more than once on the same page with more than one ad unit. Some of you have told us that dupes are a minor annoyance to both you and your users. They do little to enhance your site’s experience or entice users to click. (That’s not to say that a user would have to be a dupe to click on a dupe, but still… )

Fewer “dupes,” more “uniques”
In response to your concerns, we recently did some fine tuning. Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of an enhancement that should improve the number of unique ads shown on pages with more than one ad unit. This enhancement applies to all types of ads, but impacts only our self-service publishers (i.e., most of you).

If the live enhancement follows our research model, we anticipate that, in the long run, publishers may be rewarded with higher click-through-rates (CTR).

Here’s to being unique!

—Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

Creating cool little web apps draws users—maybe

Editor’s Note: Lawrence Coburn is the founder of RateItAll.com and author of Sexy Widget, a blog devoted to the emerging widgetsphere. When I heard Lawrence—call him “Lawrence of Widgetabia”—speak at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon Vegas 2006 last November, I asked him to pen a piece on using widgets to  help  draw traffic for the third part of our ongoing series. (See the first two installments here and here.)

When Michael asked me to write a guest piece on how to help drive traffic with widgets, I got a little nervous. I can talk all day about the causes behind the rise of widgets, about best practices in developing widgets, and about the benefits of having a comprehensive widget strategy.

But I can’t talk about how to drive traffic to your site with widgets. Why? Because as a publisher, it’s out of my control if my widget is going to drive traffic to my site.

So what’s a widget?
When I talk about widgets, I’m talking about chunks of code that can be grabbed on one site, and embedded on another. Depending on who you’re talking to, widgets can also be referred to as modules, blog bling, gadgets or MySpace Codes. Here are some of my favorites:

iLike Music Widget—the iLike widget aggregates your iTunes listening history and allows you to display your recently played songs via the widget. The widget is also a music player that allows readers to play samples of the songs.

Bunchball Widget—Bunchball allows you to embed classic video games like Asteroids or Space Invaders on your blog or personal profile page.

Bitty Browser—Bitty Browser allows you to embed a fully functional, mini-browser into your blog or personal profile page.

MyBlogLog—MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking service that allows blog owners to embed a visual display of thumbnail photos of their blog’s readers. Blog readers can message each other and post public notes for each other via their MyBlogLog profiles
 

Widgets represent the next stage of the Web 2.0 phenomenon of ceding control to your site’s users. If Web 2.0 is about giving the keys to your site to your users, widgets are about providing your site’s content and functionality in a “to go” bag for your users (and your users’ readers) to consume wherever and whenever they want it. (But Larry, dude, widgets can also totally be linkbait—Rand.)

So while there are things you can do to minimize the obstacles in the adoption of your widget and maximize user experience, there are no guarantees that your widget will be published and/or clicked on. That’s up to the distributors (your users), and their readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

What you told us about how you display ads on your sites

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, 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 the second in a series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he will share your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Following up on our previous post about optimization, below are the results from the questions we asked our readers. Our goal is to help you understand what your fellow publishers are doing, and get you thinking about how you can improve your own publishing experience.

Q: Where do you see the most successful ad placement?

Ads embedded in content is the clear leader, with almost half of you indicating that this is where you see the most successful ad placement, followed by leaderboard placement for about a quarter of responses.

These results were not surprising to the team here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, though we have found through our own data that the right rail also performs well. Check out this post from last May, where we discussed ad placement performance and eye-tracking studies. It does make sense that more visible ads—such as those at the top of a page or embedded within content—will perform better, though optimal ad placement will vary depending on individual sites and their user bases.

Here’s another question we asked you, this one about ad design:

Q: Do you find it more successful to select ad colors that blend in with your site or contrast?

It’s overwhelmingly clear that you design ads to blend into your site, rather than to contrast. We expected that the response would be more evenly split between “Contrast” and “Blend in,” due to the fact that contrasting ads may work better to gain attention. 

Blend in or stand out?
To gain further insight, we again tapped into our experts here at Yahoo! Publisher Network to provide some helpful guidance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Search advertising changes should benefit publishers

You’re probably hip to some of the hoopla by now. Yahoo! Search Marketing, which helps advertisers pinpoint potential customers and provides the ads that run on your pages, is in the process of upgrading U.S. advertisers to a new search marketing system. The initiative is part of an across-the-board Yahoo! effort to improve our offerings for advertisers, partners, publishers and users alike. You may have heard it referred to in the media as “Project Panama.”

What’s changing for advertisers
This ongoing effort involves phased releases of new enhancements, features and functionality. On February 5, Yahoo! will launch a new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. Under the current model, bids are ranked exclusively by bid amount. With this change, ads will be ranked in search results by both bid amount and ad quality.

The new ranking model  is designed to allow advertisers to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of their ads. An ad’s quality will primarily be determined by its historical performance—its click-through rate relative its position in search results—as well as its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

But what about me, the publisher?
We do not anticipate that this change should immediately affect your Yahoo! Publisher Network account—you won’t need to take any action. Over the long haul, however, encouraging advertisers to develop higher quality ads should bring up the value of our network for everyone, and benefit publishers in particular.

To learn more about the quality index and the new approach to ad ranking, check out our post on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Also, be sure and check out the Yodel Anecdotal post from our CEO, Terry Semel, about what “Panama” means in the grand scheme of things.

—The Team

Raising the colors on Yahoo! Publisher Network

“Color” is a word with considerable value. It’s shaded with meaning. Expressions like “the color of money,” “color me old-fashioned,” “colorful language,” “local color,” “technicolor yawn” and “colorful character” rarely raise a hue or cry because of their cultural saturation, but they are still useful in letting others know the tone of your feelings and how your worldview is tinted—they let you reveal your true colors.

Each color has its connotations: Gray is associated with elegance; blue with peace, as well as technology; red with anger, protest and revolution—stand up for color and make a change!—green with fertility; yellow with joy; purple with sensuality and pink with gratitude.

Do you come from a red state or a blue one? Are you a full-fledged red or are you just a pink? Maybe you’re a patriot called to the colors? Are you red with rage? Green with envy? Does your cloud have a silver lining? Ever tied a yellow ribbon ’round the old oak tree? Did you know that people who have the colorful condition known as synesthesia can hear, taste, smell and even feel color.

At Yahoo! Publisher Network we like colors. Lots of them. That’s why we built a palate of 216 websafe colors and hues into our ad serving platform. That’s more colors than you’ll find a box of crayons. Don’t believe me? Just Yahoo! “crayons” and see for yourself. Your typical box of crayons has just 64.

In addition, you can upload any color of your choice, as long as you know the code for it. The possibilities are hexadecimal. In theory at least, there should be 16⁸, or 4,294,967,296, possible color combinations to use at your whim. Of course, not every single HTML color string will translate into a distinct color. But still, there are a lot of colors to choose from; maybe not a tretrigintillion or even a duotrigintillion, but more than enough to start your own color guard.

You’re free to dabble in our hues, and experiment with all the colors of our rainbow. You may not verge on a Van Gogh, and maybe your aesthetics don’t match Mondrian’s. Maybe you want your ads to stand out from your page, or maybe you want them to blend in. We’ll never tell you what colors you can and can’t use, as long as your users know they’re looking at “Ads by Yahoo!”

We’re not like those persnickety rock stars who insist that their dressing rooms be stocked with only the green M&M’s. Consider us colorblind, but in a good way.
 

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

Editor’s Note: In the second post of our series on traffic-driving tactics, Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, discusses “linkbait,” one of the newest social media tactics that savvy websters are using to get users and customers to take note.

For the vast majority of web marketers, three unique elements define the goals of nearly every project—traffic, conversion and branding. When implemented properly, Linkbait is a great tactic for achieving two of these three goals (traffic and branding) directly, and the other (conversion) indirectly. In this post, I’ll outline what linkbait is, how it works and how you can implement it to benefit your business.

What is Linkbait?
In the offline world, companies often hire public relations specialists to plan a viral media campaign that will attract attention from major news outlets (radio, TV and print). The worst of these are often slammed as “PR stunts,” while the best help a company achieve positive association through a trusted media platform. In the online world, linkbait serves the same function—as a short-term, burst-like PR effort. Basically, linkbait is content on a web site that targets link-friendly audiences such as bloggers, news sites and social media aggregation portals.

Linkbait can be nearly anything from a simple photo or “Top 10″ list to an interactive web-based application, or an entirely new business. It can also combine the practices of viral marketing with current popular technology trends in order to create compelling, link-friendly content. Generally, linkbait content fits the following rules:

• Intended to target widely-read online portals (Digg, Fark, Yahoo! Site of the Day, Boing Boing)
•  Fits criteria for being viral-worthy and link-worthy (creates a discussion, sparks controversy, provides something revolutionary or is exciting/interesting to viewers)
• Easy to link to, email, blog about, excerpt and share
• Timely, topical and useful

Read the rest of this entry »

Or: The Robot Ate My Web Page…

Editor’s Note: In the second post in our series on optimizing your web pages for ad relevancy, Yahoo! Publisher Network Senior Product Manager Cody Simms and Senior Product Manager Amit Paunikar talk about how important it is to feed our “bots” a steady diet of tasty, easily digestible content. Cody and Amit also show how you can cook up more palatable pages to help keep our gormandizing little bots coming back for more—and help keep your ads relevant.

As we mentioned last week, content is king… but only if our content analyzers—the “bots” that read your text—can appropriately analyze your content. Here are some tips to help make sure our bots gobble up all of the good stuff.

Anatomy of a web page
Bots digest everything they eat, but only if they can eat it. They love text. In fact, they can’t get enough of it. If you want to help make your site compelling to a bot, focus on making it as text-based as possible.

Carving up a web page is not entirely unlike carving up a side of beef. Here’s a quick diagram showing the choice cuts that bots like to eat, and the ones they don’t:

In particular, bots struggle with:

• Images (Of course, your site does need images; just make sure that you use “ALT text” so that bots can nibble on them.)
• Multimedia
• Flash
• Frames
• Pull-down lists
• Fly-out menus
• Anything behind a log-in

If you want to avoid “robotic indigestion,” be sure to explicitly include important topic-oriented items in the text fields in your site, rather than hinting at them in images or other elements.

While you’re at it, check your robots.txt file to make certain that you aren’t blocking our bots. Check out robotstxt.org for more information.

There’s no place like home
Home pages, sometimes called index pages, are the face of your web site. First impressions matter to bots just as much as they do on first dates. But home pages can be sometimes tricky for contextual ad networks.

Most home pages have static content, and that’s bad. If the content is static, the ads related to the content will likely also be static. Static ads can lead to user fatigue—users get bored looking at the same content all the time, just like bots. This may result in low click-through rates, which can result in reduced revenue.

You can help remedy this situation by adding some dynamic content on the home page—content that changes frequently while remaining on-topic for your audience. New content perks up your audience, as well as our content analyzers.

Some home pages, especially on blogs and forums, have the opposite problem. They are too dynamic and can become topically inconsistent. This can result in ads that are all over the map. Using the Ad Targeting feature can help alleviate this issue, though it’s important to stay on-topic and on-target with your audience.

Site structure
Just like content, you can use your site’s structure to help your users and our bots understand what your site is about. In fact, site structure can be just as important as content for semantic analysis. Here are some tips to help you out:

Integrate keywords into your URL structure
One way to do this is to use “permalinks” rather than “query strings,” for example:

Permalink (good):
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/educationjobs

Query string (bad):
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/jobseeker/jobsearch/search_results.html?job_interest=EDUEDUCA&country1=USA&metro_area=1&basicsearch=0&advancedsearch

Use strong keywords as “anchor text”
Link text should be descriptive of the content that your user will find under the link, especially when linking to your own sites, both in navigation and in editorial content. For example:

“Education jobs,” not “Click here”

Use concise descriptors
It’s important to put a short description under a link, for context, where possible:

Education jobs
Search for jobs in the education field, including teacher jobs and administration jobs.

Next time: Writing good, bot-loving content, meta-tags, and keeping the noise down.

–Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

This social media service will be a boon to publishers

As announced this morning, MyBlogLog has officially joined the Yahoo! family.  As an early user and proponent, I’m personally very excited about this, but more importantly I’m here to report that it’s another terrific tool we can offer to help publishers analyze, understand, and maybe even increase their traffic.

MyBlogLog’s signature Reader Roll’s functionality is easy to grasp, but its implications to publishers are powerful: This distributed community widget turns passive readers into mini-publishers and connects publishers to each other via readers-in-common. In this way, the Reader Roll deepens the publisher/reader relationship—and transforms the entire web into a distributed social network.

Is that all, you ask? Nope, there’s more! MyBlogLog also offers full-fledged publisher analytics, which combine with its community features to create a unique and powerful way for publishers (be they large media companies, serious webmasters, or hobbyists) to learn about their readers. We’re not just talking about page-view counts and referral URLs here, but names, faces and personalities, too.

How it works is very simple. Check out this Reader Roll mock-up (or the live one in the right-hand column):

It’s the last five readers of this blog who are already registered with MyBlogLog. You’ll find similar lists on YPN friends Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, and AVC, along with thousands of other sites, blogs, and personal pages across the web.

If you click on the user photos, you’ll see a profile page that includes any websites the users claim as publishers (each of which has its own MyBlogLog page), join their contact networks or the community networks for any of their sites, leave them a message, and see what links are “hot” among their readership. You can also see any sites for which they’ve joined the reader community, information that the users have elected to share (such as their Yahoo! IM handles, Flickr usernames, and the like).

Once you sign up as a publisher, you get access to all the same kinds of information about your readers, plus detailed “eyes-only” web analytics stats in a really easy-to-use format. You can even expose some of that information to your readers, if you like. Note also that there’s a leverage effect to the network, because your readers, by interacting with each other, deepen their affinity as your audience—and because you can get information and insight not only on your readers’ activities on your site, but, in aggregate, off your site as well (for example, articles popular among your readers). You may even find that you get new traffic from visitors of other sites that you read or are similar to yours—my MyBlogLog community page has been among the largest sources of traffic to my own blog since I joined. 

Thus MyBlogLog helps us offer another set of innovative social media tools to publishers. Over the longer term, the terrific team that built it will continue to expand upon the explosion of publisher-enabling technologies that can help you drive revenue, grow traffic, and build cool experiences… but we’ll leave the details up to speculation for now ;-).

In the meantime, congratulations to Eric, Todd, Scott, and the rest of the talented MyBlogLog team.  Please welcome them to the Yahoo! publisher community and give their services a whirl!

—Greg Cohn Senior Manager, Market Segments

Editor’s Note: For WebmasterWorld’s PubCon 2006 conference in Las Vegas, a couple of our star performers here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, Senior Product Manager, Cody Simms, and Senior Product Manager, Amit Paunikar, put together a presentation on how publishers can optimize their web sites to help improve the relevancy of their contextual ads. It drew praise from all and sundry. For those of you who could not be at PubCon, we’ve turned the presentation into a four-part blog series. In the first chapter, we offer a little “Contextual Advertising 101″ to help get you grounded. In subsequent chapters, we’ll show you how you can optimize your pages to help improve relevancy.
 

What motivates publishers?

The anecdote is legendary. Orson Welles, while directing one of his films, told an actor to cross from one side of the set to the other. “What’s my motivation for this cross?” the actor wanted to know.

“Your paycheck on Friday!” growled Welles.

While running a network for publishers, we’ve learned that publishers come in all shapes and sizes, and are motivated to publish for all kinds of reasons—including their paychecks on Friday. Some of you enjoy the “work-at-home” lifestyle. Others like the community aspects of publishing. Some want to stay in touch with the technical innovations that online publishing is bringing to software, and enjoy the challenges of search engine optimization and monetization.

But whatever your motivation, two ultimate success measures stand out: revenue and traffic generation.

Keep your eyes on the prize, and optimize
Optimizing your site for contextual advertising can help you with both of these success measures. Contextual advertising crawlers and search engine crawlers are very similar, so some time and effort optimizing for a contextual crawler could help make your site more search engine-friendly, too.
 
So just what is contextual advertising?
But contextual advertising is not search advertising, and that’s the rub. In the absence of clear user intent—i.e., a user search for a specific product or service via a search engine—contextual advertising systems have to rely on secondary factors to glean what the user is looking for to serve up appropriate ad content. Users’ intentions can be derived from their behavior, their demographic information, or from the information available from the content of the pages they’re browsing. Demographic and behavioral information is hard to come by due to privacy and a host of other issues. Therefore, most contextual advertising networks rely heavily on semantic analysis of the content a given user is browsing—specifically, the content on your pages.

Contextual advertising is intended for content-oriented pages where users are passively consuming content (as opposed to search results pages where users have expressed a clear interest). Contextual advertising relies on one underlying major assumption: that a user is interested in the content of the page if he or she is reading that page. Contextual advertising therefore uses semantic analysis to determine the context of the page and then provide advertising of a similar topic.

Semantic analysis, you say?
Semantic analysis involves text mining, term/phrase extraction, SVMs, page vector analysis, associations and all that jazz. Um… what are these things, you may ask? In simpler terms, semantic analysis relies on good, clear, topic-oriented content on a well formatted page. We’ll come back to both of these ideas in the third post in this series.

The bottom line is that “content is the king” when it comes to getting relevant ads on a page. With a little attention and a bit of luck, you can improve your ads’ relevancy, along with that paycheck on Friday.

Next week: The anatomy of a webpage, site structure and bots.

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager, and Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

What are yours?

No, we don’t mean “go to the gym more often,” “lose weight,” “quit drinking coffee” or any of those physical impossibilities. We mean, what are your publishing New Year’s resolutions?

We want to know because we’d like to help you meet your goals—if you’re successful, we’re successful. Here are a few topic ideas to get you thinking, and some links to a few pointers that we’ve published since the blog launch last April:

To Better Engage Users
Getting users to interact with your content, and not just look at it, is a way to help keep them hooked. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past year, and have pointed the way to new Yahoo! APIs, mash-ups, widgets and badges from del.icio.us, Answers, Photos, Flickr, Maps and Upcoming.org, as well as Finance. Do these kinds of social media tools capture your fancy?

To Build Higher Traffic
More traffic, especially more of the right traffic, can often lead to more qualified clicks. On the blog, we’re currently in the middle of a series on guerilla marketing techniques to help you build your traffic. We posted the first of these articles in December. Be on the lookout for a lot more to come in 2007.

To Optimize My Ad Units
Should I put my ad units on the top or on the side? How many should I have on each page? What’s the most effective color? We’ve dealt with some of these questions before. Recently, we shared our research findings into how you optimize ad configuration and categories, and offered insight into improvement. Last spring we gave tips on ad placement and color matching. You’ll be seeing a lot more of this in future.

To Develop More Intriguing Content
Content is king. After all, what else do you want people talk about when they get to your site but your content? Creating good content is hard. But there are options. We’ve blogged about how you can use Creative Commons—the non-profit group that offers flexible-copyright content [what does flexible-copyright content mean?]—to ad “cred” to your site with authoritative content and share your own expertise with the world. Meanwhile, Jeremy Zowadny has elaborated on the Zen of blogging, and we’ve pointed you to a good source to help keep your site free of jargon. 

To Create a Better-looking Site
If there’s one thing famed blogstress Jen Slegg can’t stand, it’s an ugly website. Neither can I, I might add. To help turn publishers into aesthetes, we’ve been running a series on how to achieve good design. So far we’ve covered designing for the Web 2.0 style, leveraging research to design for your users, and on using patterns and pattern libraries to keep your look and feel consistent.

To Get Higher in Search Rankings
Everyone wants to get on top—especially on top of search rankings. We’ve blogged both about pay-as-you-go techniques, as well as SEM for everyone. Beginning next week, we’ll be running a series on optimizing your pages for search. Be sure to look for it.

Our New Year’s resolution here at Yahoo? To help do more good. Recently, Yahoo! for Good, in association with Network for Good launched Charity Badges. These customizable badges allow your users to donate to the charity or charities of your choice, right from your website. In addition, Yahoo! is giving a matching gift of up to $50,000 to the charity promoted by the top-performing Charity Badge.

We think that’s a resolution for good.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor and the Team