Partnership lets PCMag target its users on Yahoo! pages

The PCMag Digital Network, the online publishing arm of Ziff Davis Media, has always delivered active tech shoppers to its advertisers through its technology reviews. However, when demand began to outpace supply, it took a partnership with Yahoo! to deliver more impressions to help advertisers reach those buyers when they weren’t reading reviews.

The Problem:
PCMag Digital Network wanted to offer its advertisers more traffic on its most coveted reviews pages, such as those in its printer and laptop sections. Although PCMag Digital Network reviews over 2000 products a year, demand for advertising on reviews pages outstripped supply. PCMag Digital Network needed a way to offer its advertisers higher volumes of its most targeted tech buyers.

The Solution:
The company formed a partnership with Yahoo! that lets its advertisers reach users on Yahoo! pages, exponentially expanding PCMag.com’s available advertising space.

The Yahoo! partnership brought huge benefits to PCMag Digital Network and its advertisers. PCMag Digital Network was able to expand its targeted inventory to the Yahoo! site, reaching its most targeted readers in a new environment.

“This partnership with Yahoo! makes it easier for advertisers to reach more of our highly targeted, influential tech buyers,” says Jim Selden, VP of marketing for the PCMag Digital Network.

But it wasn’t just the extra pages that appealed to the PCMag Digital Network — it was the way it could retarget its readers on the Yahoo! site. Roughly 90 percent of PCMag.com visitors read its reviews, and more than 70 percent plan on buying technology products, services, or consumer electronics within the next 12 months. So there’s a huge benefit to serving an ad to a review reader even when that person isn’t on PCMag.com. Through the partnership, if someone reads a printer review on PCMag.com, PCMag Digital Network can “follow” that user onto the Yahoo! pages. An advertiser could serve a printer ad to that user hours, days or even weeks later, no matter what type of content the user was reading.

“Being able to retarget advertisers from specific sections is a huge benefit,” says Crystal Luginbuhl, director of client services at PCMag Digital Network. “An advertiser of printers is interested in an audience who is researching printers. Through Yahoo! retargeting, these tech-related ads can follow a user throughout the day on our network site and on to Yahoo! sites.”

The Results:
The Yahoo! partnership increases the amount of inventory PCMag Digital Network can offer its advertisers by more than 400 percent, which can help keep advertiser spending high even when the PCMag Digital Network’s own inventory is tight. Because the partnership still allows advertisers to target potential buyers, they can serve ads on Yahoo! without sacrificing performance. “Our consumer electronic categories yield comparable click-through results,” Luginbuhl says, “and combined with greater reach and scale and lower cost per impressions, that greatly benefits the advertiser.”

Newspaper Consortium members seeing sales results from partnership 

We mentioned last week that some of our Newspaper Consortium members were seeing early success. The New York Times has a story this week that looks more deeply at the Newspaper Consortium and the effect it’s having on traditional newspaper sales forces. The article says that newspapers are finding the partnership with Yahoo! one of the bright spots in a tough advertising market.

The article talks about how newspapers can pitch local businesses “that let them reach visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites and Yahoo! users in the area,” and also use Yahoo! technology such as APT. The results so far include:

[A] sales blitz at The Ventura County Star, a small daily north of Los Angeles, netted nearly $1 million in sales in the run-up to Christmas, or roughly 40 percent of what the paper sold in online ads in 2008. The Naples Daily News in Florida did even better: The late-January blitz generated $2 million in sales, or more than half what the paper sold online in 2008. Some larger newspapers have had similar successes.

“If we could do just shy of $1 million in two weeks in a horrible economy, what does it mean for us when the economy turns?” asked George H. Cogswell III, publisher of The Ventura County Star.

Visit apt.yahoo.com for more about the Newspaper Consortium and APT.

— The Team

Publisher news of interest as we march into March

Ready for spring? Us, too. Here are a few random items that have poked through the topsoil and warmed our winter-weary brains:

Yahoo! Buzz turns one
At the party celebrating my first birthday, I wowed attendees by taking my first steps. Our social content site Buzz recently celebrated its first birthday, but it hit the ground running from Day One. Brian McMullin, a Product Lead for Buzz, discusses the year’s highlights in a post on our corporate blog Yodel Anecdotal. If you haven’t buzzed on over to the hive to see how we sting the competition with the ability for any publisher to add content, now’s your chance.

Finding the missing links
Inbound link-building may not be the Holy Grail of online publishing, but it’s pretty close. In this informative article on Search Engine Watch, Carrie Hill provides several useful strategies for increasing the number of links that point toward your site. More importantly perhaps, she also cautions against link-building tactics that will decrease the quality of traffic and make your efforts look spammy. Carrie obviously knows what’s she’s doing, because we’ve now linked to her article twice in one paragraph.

Offline publishing: The beginning of the end?
Nearly every day I see or hear a reference to Amazon’s Kindle device, and it seems one newspaper after the next is folding or laying off employees. That puts online publishers in the driver’s seat, a view supported by this article on InternetNews.com, which describes the Hearst Corp.’s plans to introduce a digital reading device of its own. I guess I’m still a relative Luddite in this area, because I have yet to see a Kindle in person, and the last book I bought was a paper-and-ink version of a 50-year-old tome that has curiously risen up Amazon’s bestseller list in the last eight weeks.

Deep in the heart
Webmaster World’s PubCon show makes its first-ever visit to Texas next week, highlighted by a keynote speech from one of the seeds of the Apple Macintosh, Guy Kawasaki. The Austin event, scheduled for March 11-13, also features a wide variety of breakout sessions and other opportunities for brain-picking and hob-nobbing with your publishing peers. Register by the end of the day today for a $100 discount.

— Jeff Hecox