7 ways to help you get more relevant YPN ads

Everybody wants relevant ads on their pages—the more relevant they are, the more they’re clicked and the more you’re paid. But how can you ensure that the ads on the page are as relevant as they can be?  Here are some tips to help get more relevant and targeted ads .

Use YPN ad targeting
Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) has a targeting feature unique to the YPN platform called ad targeting.  With this, you can specify the targeting category in which your page or site fits best.  There are 20 categories and 127 subcategories to choose from.  You can target an entire site, a directory, even selecting specific pages.  You are limited to 50 targeting sites/directories/pages in your Ad Categories section.  It is worth noting that you don’t have to specifically use the targeting for the page content, you can also target based on your user’s interests.  So if your blog is about blogging, you could decide to use the “Office Electronics” category since you assume many of those who are learning about blogging may also be interested in office gadgets and electronics.

 And best of all, if you don’t feel any of the options are best for you, you can explore new categories and subcategories.

Optimize your titles
Yes, there are still people who have just their site name as the title tag on every page of their site.  (What? You?) So make sure you have an appropriate title for each page on your site.  Not only will this help with ad targeting, but it will also be a huge benefit in the search index too.  If someone sees your page in the search results, it might be the perfect page for what they are looking for, but if all they see in the title tag is “My Site Name at MySiteName.com”, changes are extremely high they will go onto the next result where the title tells them the page is what they are looking for and not just the generic site name.

Optimize your meta tags
Since meta tags have faded as a regular search optimization technique, many of us have gotten lazy about doing them at all.  But adding metas can help for ad targeting, and still give you some benefits in the search index.  And if you have forgotten how to do them, or never learned, here are samples:

<META name=”description” content=”A very short blurb about what the page is about.”> 
<META name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, etc”>

Excessive keywords
Sure, someone told you mesothelioma ads pay really well, but adding the word mesothelioma 100 times in tiny text at the bottom won’t help your ad targeting, nor will the search engines like it very much.  So while having a good keyword density will help target your ads, going overboard won’t help… especially if your site is about cooking and nothing to do with mesothelioma!  Just make sure you have the appropriate keywords in your content, but not so repetitive that it seems odd to anyone reading it.

Block non-relevant ads
Sometimes you may see ads that don’t fit the context of your page—maybe it’s confusion over things such as “apple” vs. “Apple.” In this case, take advantage of the YPN ad blocking feature.  Just block the URL of the advertiser to prevent the ad from appearing.  If you keep seeing these ads on particular page, consider changing the suspect keywords if they aren’t key to your search engine optimization of that page.

Great content
Yes, this should be a given, but not many people remember this, judging by some of the sites I have seen out there.  Good, quality content tends to have the best targeted ads. The content of the site, combined with other factors (many of which are listed in this article), drive the types of ads placed on your site.  The advertisers who are willing to place ads on your site do so based on matching the content of your site to their ads as closely as possible. And, of course, you will be giving your users the best experience available.  Don’t forget that if someone lands on a site with really bad content, they are much more likely to quickly hit the back button than they ever are to actually click one of the ads you have on the page.

Clean up your sidebars
Sidebars are a great spot to put all kinds of miscellaneous stuff, along with navigation, especially for those who are running YPN on a blog.  But all that extra text, such as links to memes, blogrolls and widgets can contribute to your ad targeting.  So if you are finding the ads are too general to the site (especially if you have an extensive navigation system) and not specific enough to the individual pages, all the “extras” on the page could be the culprit.

If you are having problems with your ad targeting, these tips will likely help solve some, if not all, of your targeting issues.  And when you have great targeting, you will end up with a much higher click-through rate, meaning more revenue in your pocket.

—Jennifer Slegg

Jennifer Slegg is a well known expert in contextual advertising and content monetization and blogs frequently on both JenSense.com and JenniferSlegg.com. She is a regular speaker at industry conferences including Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo and ADSPACE. You can also follow her on Twitter at jenstar.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user David Evers.