Online car shopping site Cars.com wanted to help automobile manufacturer advertisers extend their reach to target users shopping for specific cars beyond Cars.com—and found a way to increase clicks by letting advertisers target potential customers on Yahoo! pages, too. 

About Cars.com
Cars.com, a division of Classified Ventures, LLC, offers online ad solutions for automakers, dealers and private-party sellers in the form of classified advertising solutions, banner advertisements and lead-generation.

The problem
Cars.com wanted to offer its advertisers more frequency—and more inventory to choose from—but wanted a high-quality source that its advertisers could trust. An automobile purchase is a high-ticket, considered decision, and the traditional consumer shopping behavior is changing due to the economy. The time horizon has extended, as shoppers consider switching to a new vehicle category, and shoppers are more likely to visit multiple dealerships before locking in their decision on a make or model. So insulating the buyer experience from other manufacturers is now even more important to a manufacturer than ever before, no matter where they go online.

“We are a pure-play automotive site with comprehensive new and used car inventory, as well as editorial content that assists car shoppers in making an informed purchase,” says Joan Ritter, Director of Advertising Marketing Development at Cars.com.  “What this means is that the only reason someone goes to Cars.com is because they are in car-shopping mode—whether early on or late in the decision process. It’s extremely efficient in delivering a car-shopping audience.” What Cars.com needed was a re-targeting solution that would help it extend its capability to other inventory.

The solution
Cars.com formed a partnership with Yahoo! that lets it sell Yahoo! non-guaranteed inventory to its advertisers. “We were attracted to the Yahoo! name, as well as the fact that our clients didn’t view Yahoo! as an ad network,” says Karen Kurtz, Advertising Product Manager of Cars.com. Advertisers felt that Yahoo! would place their ads on higher-quality inventory than ad networks would, giving them advertisers more impressions and more control of their images. 

In addition, Cars.com can tag a user, including the type of car they were investigating and the regions they live in, and run ads for relevant cars when those users visit pages on the Yahoo! site. “On Yahoo!, we get an extra boost,” Kurtz says. “They may not be looking for a car at the moment, but we can serve them a brand reminder after their visit to Cars.com. Because the ad placement on the Yahoo! network is no longer on an in-market site, it is interruptive, and therefore click-through behavior can be impressive. For those manufacturers who make clicks to their own site an objective, this can be very valuable.”

The results
The Yahoo! partnership has dramatically increased the amount of impressions that Cars.com can offer to its advertisers. That, in turn, gives them more opportunities to reach users. “Yahoo! has 30 to 100 times the inventory that we do,” Kurtz says. “We can present it to advertisers as an upsell to help them extend their brand.”

Cars.com says that the partnership and its retargeting capabilities has made it simpler for advertisers to get their ads in front of the right kind of customers. Automobile companies can buy Yahoo! ads for users who checked out competing cars, a practice called “conquesting” that Cars.com typically doesn’t allow on its own site.

Says Ritter: “We consider the Cars.com Yahoo! re-targeting buy to be the ultimate one-two punch solution for both local dealerships, as well as for manufacturers. It marries the Cars.com quality audience to the Yahoo! distribution network. And our advertisers and agencies are excited about the ability to get such a powerful ad buy in one fell swoop.”

— The Team

Yahoo!’s Professional Services team is everywhere these days. Last week we blogged about several events Yahoo! would be participating in, an IAB Professional Development class about Managing Multiple Sales Channels being one of them. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helped publishers and networks set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. Luckily for me the class was in San Francisco: No travel required!

Within the first few minutes we heard why attendees had given up three hours of their day to be there. The reasons the attendees gave ranged from getting a handle on yield management to developing streams of new ad revenue to dealing with channel conflict. With this industry changing as quickly as it is, I understood where these people were coming from. Luckily, Jeanne and Marc had a few tricks up their sleeves to deal with these issues. The three biggest takeaways were:

Times, they are a changin’
The industry is undergoing a dramatic shift. Marketers are becoming savvier; they have fewer ad dollars to spend but have more metrics at their fingers than ever before, and they want results. Over the last few years we’ve seen a shift in ad dollars from brand to performance. Roll in agencies’ demand for more transparency, and you can see how this is causing a pain point that publishers and networks must address. Bottom line:Publishers and networks must become savvy sellers of performance advertising.

Just say no
Successful sales teams work with marketers to identify the goals of a campaign but, more importantly, they help determine if the campaign is likely to see success on their site or network.  Is the marketer looking for clicks or conversions, and what are those worth? Who is their target audience?Does the creative have a clear call to action?Is the conversion path short?Does it require minimal registration information that is easily provided (Such as a zip code as opposed to a social security number)?Bottom line:If the answers to the previous questions point to a bad campaign, sales teams must learn to just say no.

Differentiate to survive
How do you avoid conflict among channels that are selling the exact same inventory?You don’t—it’s inevitable. If marketers are able to access the same inventory from multiple sales outlets, they can take the lowest price, ultimately degrading the value of your inventory. You can fight slipping CPMs by allowing different channels to sell different slices of inventory determined by targeting, frequencies, properties, and so on.  Bottom line:Differentiate what sales channels are able to sell to help avoid conflict.  

—Megan Bergtholdt, Engagement Manager

You know it’s a great panel when quips are tweeted:

Yahoo!’s Bill Wise: “I’m smarter than you.”
Time Inc. Media Group’s Kirk McDonald: “You work for Yahoo—how could you be?”

The ribbing was all in good fun, livening up Bill and Kirk’s panel at the Digiday targeting conference’s  ”The Publisher Roundtable.” But Bill, our GM of Global Exchanges, got the last laugh when the audience caught Kirk apparently stretching his experience in the industry by checking his LinkedIn profile.

In addition to providing a ton of laughs, the conference also tackled some big questions around the industry’s use of data and where the market is moving.

What data is a proxy to valuable customers?
There was no argument that the industry felt that they need to use data to enable accuracy, efficiency and scale. There was also no argument that this is HARD! (Well, duh.) Making data actionable and figuring out which data to use is why hundreds of networks and service providers specialize in only this.

What I didn’t hear enough of was taking into account the consumer consideration cycle and user intent. One panelist did make a great analogy: If there is a 25+ male, high-income, investor on a slide with his kids on a playground, you probably don’t want to choose that time to talk to him about 401ks. The same thing goes for online advertising: you want to target him with a 401k ad when he is in research mode.

Where do we need to go?
What was clear throughout all the panels is that everyone is an intermediary— networks, agencies, and publishers. Networks and publishers increasingly offer agency-like services: Time discussed its branded network, and one of White Pages’ core service offerings is behavioral targeting. We are entering a world of “co-opetition.” Publishers need to focus on syndication to aggregate similar individuals and will likely start selling audiences rather than placements.

—Megan Pagliuca, Director of Consulting, Professional Services

Are you trying to capture more ad dollars? Juggle multiple sales channels? If you’re like most publishers, those questions aren’t far from your mind. Fortunately, the answers aren’t either—especially if you can make it to one of the events Yahoo! is participating in next week in New York and San Francisco.

Yahoo! will be taking opportunities at OMMA Publish, a one-day event on June 17 for publishers In New York, to discuss the challenges faced by the publishing industry—and some of the solutions. Jacob Ross, director of partner professional services, will speak on a panel, “Can Technology Save Publishing?” (We haven’t seen the panel yet, but we assume their answer is “Yes.”) Jacob, along with publishers and representatives from technology companies, will help publishers sort through the ad networks, distribution platforms, site optimization tools, and social media options available to them now. The panel also asks whether technology is becoming more critical than content itself.

If you think you should be doing more with your inventory, you may want to check out Yahoo!’s lunch session, “Get the Most out of Your Inventory by Capturing Performance Ad Dollars.” In the session, Megan Pagliuca (Director of Consulting, Professional Services) and Shoen Yang (Agency Professional Services, Consulting) talk about how ad dollars are increasingly moving online and toward performance marketing instead of brand marketing. More importantly, they tell you how to understand your advertiser’s needs and set up your team to grab some of those dollars yourself.

On the opposite coast, and a day earlier, Yahoo! will share its thoughts on managing multiple sales channels at an IAB Professional Development Class in San Francisco. The class, led by Marc Grabowski, senior director of network sales, and Jeanne Hwang, director of consulting, helps publishers set up their sales teams to develop ad packages that cross sales channels and maximize their inventory. One of the strategies they will discuss is treating non-premium inventory as non-guaranteed inventory that can be sold to performance advertisers, rather than simply as your remnants.

If you’ll be in either of these cities, check us out. If you’re not, hey—we’re no more than half a continent away.

—The Team

There are still about three weeks to go until June 21, but in my book, Memorial Day signaled the beginning of summer. And if like me you’re in the midst of reading a 1,000+-page paperback, you may need those extra days just to finish it before the leaves start changing in the fall.

To provide a much quicker bite of what’s going on in the online publishing world, we’ve compiled a handful of recent news items below. You should be able to digest these while the charcoal is getting hot during your next cookout. Enjoy…

Pretty as a (legal) picture
Looking for a photo to add to one of your site’s pages? Sure, you can probably find what you seek somewhere on the Web, but can you reuse it for commercial purposes? A new Creative Commons license filter in Yahoo! Image Search makes it easy to find a pic that’s compelling and won’t get you in trouble with the authorities.

Link-building like a pro
Eric Enge at Search Engine Watch offers an interesting and informative article on planning and executing a link-building campaign. Among his advice: Publish great content (or tools) on your site, and avoid publishing “me too” type of content. Says Enge: “Plan on publishing stuff that establishes your organization as a leader in its market.”

Turns out they will pay to read
While many newspapers struggle to keep customers paying for a print version while offering the same product online for free, two smaller dailies have found that what might seem counter-intuitive actually seems to work. According to this article by AP writer Michael Liedtke, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Idaho Falls Post-Register are now restricting their online content to paying subscribers—with surprising results. Says the publisher of the Post-Register: “To just give [our content] all away on a Web site is completely and blindly idiotic.”

Fee-based services to supplement ad revenue?
In a related article, The New York Times examines how websites are looking beyond hosting ads to keep afloat in these challenging economic times. Some of the solutions include: a restaurant reservation site that gets a dollar for every diner seated at its clients’ tables, and an online golf game site that charges small amounts for premium virtual putters and greens fees.

— Jeff Hecox

Photo courtesy Norby on Flickr.

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.

I really wanted to start off this roundup with a clip from the recent visit of Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” to Yahoo!, but it doesn’t exist yet in video form on the Web—which, in my mind, is the same as not existing at all. So you’ll have to settle for reruns and wondering what a salmon cupcake really tastes like. Oh, and these publisher-focused morsels…

Mmm…Delicious
The Yahoo! Search blog digs into new features for Search BOSS, our search platform that lets you customize Yahoo! Search for your content pages. In particular, they like BOSS’s integration with Delicious social bookmarks to help deliver even more relevant results.Over on the Developer Network blog, they show you how to build a module that uses your page content to generate a list of Yahoo! results, re-ranked by their popularity on Delicious. I don’t pretend to understand that code-y stuff there. But I hope that you do, because if used properly, it could help you generate more relevant content to go with the content that your readers are already reading.

Social media sucks
If you ask one of my less-social colleagues, the reason why social media “sucks” is because it’s a “waste of time.” (And here I thought that was the point.) But Josh Bernoff writes on Forrester Research’s Groundswell blog that social media disappoints advertisers because they’re treating it like, well, media. “Media is something you can advertise in, in most cases. While you can advertise in social networks, that is the least interesting use for them,” he says. When businesses start treating social networks as something other than media, they can start to capitalize on them.

…but you’re still using it
Speaking of social—um, whatever you want to call it: Marketing Vox reports on a Harris Interactive poll, saying that “over half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites—MySpace and Facebook.” That seems like a curious spin. Doesn’t that also mean that pretty much half of Americans are on those sites? The poll also says that, despite the hype, just 5% of Americans are using Twitter.

Wait…those were flops?
The folks who run the human-powered directory that gave Yahoo! its start (and is still going strong) pull together interesting tidbits throughout the week. I loved their piece on products that didn’t quite take off. But then again, I loved Crystal Pepsi.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Everyone should be allowed to toot their own horns once in a while. For us this is especially true, if those sounds represent products and services that could help, or be of interest to, our publishers.

In recent weeks, some of our fellow Yahoos have taken the lid off of several exciting projects, and we thought we’d share the good news…

Thanking the monkey
The Yahoo! Developer Network just introduced an enhancement to SearchMonkey, our open search platform. The new feature, as described here in the Yahoo! Search blog, enables site owners and developers to embed flash video, games and documents directly into Yahoo! Search results. Publishers can just add a few lines of code to their embedded item, the Yahoo! webcrawler will pick it up, and your listings in Yahoo! SERPs will go bananas with eye-catching images.

The best of the Web, made for TV
You might think that accessing the Internet via a television screen has been tried and failed—and you’d be right. But this is something different: Yahoo!’s TV Widgets is now being built into sets from manufacturers like Samsung and others, enabling users to interact with their favorite Web services while they watch TV. We believe that this intelligent integration is what was lacking from previous attempts at marrying television and the Web. TV Widgets picked up several “Best of CES” awards in January—tune into the details here.

New Demo Targeting and Dayparting
If you do any type of pay-per-click advertising, this is going to be welcome news: Yahoo! Search Marketing just introduced several major enhancements to our Sponsored Search product, including ad scheduling, a dayparting tool for setting the display of ads at different times and days across an entire week; and bid adjustments, which lets you specify a premium bid amount for desired demographic groups and audiences. Take a short hop over to the YSM blog for more details.

Another print newspaper bites the dust
Finally, because there’s still some news outside of Yahoo!, here’s one non-purple item: An interesting article on the continuing struggles of the print media industry. Almost daily, large traditional print publishers are moving resources to their online operations. For Web publishers, does this engender a bit of smugness and pride that you were here first; or cause fear, as you may be faced with a higher level of competition from deep-pocketed corporations?

Yahoo! is helping newspapers make this transition through our APT product serving the Newspaper Consortium, but the continuing exodus of printed papers begs another question: With what will future generations line bird cages and wrap fish?

— Jeff Hecox

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.”

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