I’ve been hearing AdSense publishers calling for this for years now but think it unlikely that they’ll do it as a result of them having invested so much into their own Google Checkout system.

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YPN Offer Publishers PayPal Payment Option

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YPN Limit maximum number of Ad Units Per Page to 3

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There’s not much in it that experienced contextual advertising publishers won’t already know but it’s a good recap of some sound principles of contextual advertising for beginners.

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Earning Money From Contextual Ads

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In it Erik outlines how to show YPN ads only to US traffic and serve AdSense ads to non US traffic using a WP plugin.

PS: I can’t see similar principles in this tutorial couldn’t be used for using Chitika ads (they don’t pay for Asian traffic at this point).

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How to Target US Traffic for YPN Ads

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These advertising systems are all geographically targeted advertising systems (Chitika less so but they do to some extent). The ads you see in your part of the world can be quite different to those you see in mine.

AdSense does offer a preview tool but it only works in windows versions of IE. Chitika and YPN don’t offer such tools.

Digital Inspiration has a cool tool that might be useful for you.

The sandbox tool shows you what type of ads your site is likely to show in different geographic locations. It will also give you a comparison between the ads that the three different systems will serve to your sites in different color schemes to help you to choose what ad system might serve the most relevant ads to your blog.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of it but it seems to work and might be useful for some. Let me know what you think.

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AdSense, YPN and Chitika Preview Tool

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Addendum: I lost half of my original entry, so I’m rewriting what I wrote though probably not nearly as inspired as I was 4 hours ago when I wrote this. ;)

If you search for a keyphrase that is used on your blog, such as blogs and adsense look for your second entry that is listed in the SERPs. In Darren’s case, the second entry is in the coveted indented second entry. However, if it is not, one way to get that spot is to begin linking to that second entry from within your blog. There are different ways this can be done: deep linking, placing a link in a sidebar, etc. I’d recommend doing this contextually rather than take the appearance of “keyword stuffing”. Google may penalize you if they feel that you are simply keyword stuffing.

After you have done this, it’s time to wait awhile. Hopefully, over time you’ll see your entry migrate into that second and indented position.

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Gaining the Second Indented Google Listing

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I’ve included a screen shot of it below but it’s basically a collection of tutorials and tools to help publishers improve three aspects of their site development. Here’s how they define the three areas:

• Drive Traffic - A number of ways to get more visitors
• Enhance your Site – Quality Yahoo! tools and features from Yahoo! that differentiate your site
• Build your Site - Solutions for creating and hosting your site

Each section has it’s own page of developing these areas (screen caps of each below – click to enlarge).

I’m yet to go through each page that they provide in great detail but a lot of it seems to be promoting other Yahoo! services that they offer (cross promotion) – some of it looks useful enough though.

New Help Center

YPN have also announced a newly revamped Help Center for their publishers. This includes:

• A How-To Guide – Detailed instructions on how to use each area of the Yahoo! Publisher Network account management system
• Account FAQs – A comprehensive set of FAQs that addresses most publisher questions
• Account Overview Demo – A step-by-step guide that takes you through the most prominent features of the Yahoo! Publisher Network account management system
• Implementation Guide – Detailed assistance to help publishers set up and manage their Yahoo! Publisher Network account

Here’s some screen caps of the publishers services pages:

Here’s the Drive Traffic Section

Here’s the Enhance your Site Section

Here’s the Build your Site Section

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YPN launches Publisher Services and New Help Center

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Avg. RPC ($) which stands for ‘Average Revenue Per Click’ which they define as:

“This shows the average amount of revenue you earn each time someone clicks an ad on your site. Average RPC is equal to (Revenue)/(Clicks).”

This is something that AdSense publishers have been asking for for a long time (ever since I’ve been in the AdSense program at least) and I’ll be interested to see if AdSense give in as a result of YPN going this way.

In effect the RPC figure is something that publishers could work out for themselves but it is nice to see it, especially in a monthly report so that it can be compared from day to day.

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YPN adds RPC (Revenue Per Click) to reports

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update: More official word on this at YPN’s blog.

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YPN add Payment Features

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I just logged into b5media’s YPN account and the back end is not working but the blogs we’re running the ads on are definitely not showing them either.

I guess publishers need to remember that YPN is in beta and from time to time will have problems. It’s not really any comfort but part of the process.

update: not long after posting this I started seeing ads on our blogs that run YPN so perhaps things are back up and running again.

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YPN Publishers Experiencing Down Time

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They recommend a leaderboard ad above the fold between content and the top navigation bar.

Secondly they suggest using vertical skyscrapers to the right of content.

Thirdly they suggest rectangle ads in content.

I find this interesting strategy as it’s a little different from AdSense’s suggested ad placement which suggests the following ‘hot zones’.

The Yahoo advice of ads between content and the top navigational bar fits reasonably well with the AdSense heat map but the skyscraper to the right of content is a point of difference in the advice between the two contextual advertisers advice.

Both suggest ad inside content do well.

Ultimately the last advice they give is probably the main thing to listen to:

Each site is different, and each publisher has different goals,” Margaret notes. “Publishers should experiment with different placement, layouts, Reporting Categories and Ad Targeting combinations to achieve the best outcome.

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YPN’s Ad Placement Advice Compared to AdSense Advice

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Also read the official press release announcement from Yahoo as well as a note to YPN publishers on the YPN blog telling them that the improvements in the advertisers end of the process will lead to improved performance of their ads also.

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Yahoo’s Advertising Overhaul Officially announced

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‘A new ranking formula, to be adopted later this year, will also take into account the “click-through rate” of an advert, along with a number of other secret factors, said Mr Cadogan – an approach that echoes the one followed by Google.’

As the article says, this is similar to what Google has done with AdWords previously. It looks like the changes are just being announced today and the rollout is to happen in the third quarter. It will be interesting to see if YPN publishers see much of a change when the ‘overhaul’ happens.

Source – John Bartelle who has had a run through of the new system.

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Yahoo unveils ‘overhaul’ of online advertising

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Today YPN have responded to the attention that their actions got around the web in a statement on their blog – Maintaining a Quality Network. They write:

“As noted on certain message boards, some publisher accounts have been recently closed. These account closures were based solely on traffic quality issues.

Yahoo! Publisher Network is still an invite-only beta program. As such, we’re constantly refining the procedures and policies that will help maintain a quality network for our publishers and advertisers. And we won’t release the product to the general publishing community until we are able to serve our constituent’s needs well.

This is a learning experience for everyone, one of the main concerns for our 100,000-plus advertisers who participate is the quality of traffic they receive. For advertisers, we need to consider the source of traffic, the site content, click activity, and the overall quality of leads generated for our advertisers.

As publishers you are also concerned with quality – the quality and relevance of the ads you receive and how well they monetize on your sites….”

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Yahoo! Publisher Network Responds to Publisher Termination Reports

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Looking at the forums on the topic it seems that this publisher is not alone.

This could be a second round of such terminations. A couple of months ago I reported a batch of publishers having their accounts terminated for having too much international traffic.

update: Jen has more comprehensive news of this development with some interesting commentary at MySpace.com and Yahoo Publisher Network apparently don’t mix

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Yahoo Publisher Network Terminates More Publisher Accounts

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YPN have launched a blog for their YPN publishers.

• Give publishers – you folks – a voice in the evolution of the Yahoo! Publisher Network and its products.
• Build a place where you can come and learn about the latest updates and enhancements to the Network
• Showcase your work and your contributions to making Yahoo! Publisher Network what is today – and to what it will become tomorrow
• Provide a community space where you can learn from other publishers how to be a better one yourself

They’ll be posting interviews and profiles of YPN publishers as well as news relevant to publishers. Looks like a good RSS feed to subscribe to.

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Yahoo! Publisher Network Blog

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Rae starts off by asking a good question about ad relevancy – a topic that I’ve heard quite a few YPN publishers complaining about (in fact I’ve done it myself after running YPN here at ProBlogger for a month or so and seeing pretty poor results). Josh doesn’t really admit to any problems:

‘JS: I’m glad you bring this up because we’ve found that the majority of our publishers have been very happy with the ads served on their site. We do find typically that sites that have little content are harder for our crawlers to find matching ads to serve. Additionally, if your site has terms that we deem sensitive then we will serve generally targeted ads. My suggestion to help improving the ads targeted in your site is to use our Ad Targeting feature (which allows the publisher to influence the type of ad category) and make sure your content is well described and updated regularly.’

The other question that interests me in the interview is one Rae asks about YPN’s absence from the international scene. The question is a good one but once again Josh’s answer is fairly much the standard line we’ve been getting – ie the US is the focus of the beta test so that they can hone the formula for a wider rollout… challenges in going global… can’t say when we’ll release more widely…

While I understand the mammoth task of rolling out something globally I’m starting to sense a growing bitterness among international publishers towards YPN at a grass roots level. I know every time I mention them I get emails and comments on this international issue. From what I can tell the international rollout seems to be some time away and and I do wonder if they are going to have to do something to appease the international publishing community who could well go on a cyber-riot if they don’t get some attention.

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Interview with YPN Manager

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The first change is their new ‘messages’ feature (pictured below) which outlines the latest changes at YPN.

Click on the ’subjects’ of one of the messages and you get a nice little popup message that ‘greys out’ the background and highlights the message in white and tells you what the change is (see below).

The second change is – as the message says above – a new reporting feature that lets you delete and edit reporting categories.

All in all the changes are pretty minor – tweaks really – as they continue to hone their system.

update: Jen from Jensense also reports on these changes but she notices another one also – a change in reports that allows you to select dates for your report via a little popup calendar (see below).

She also notes that she’s getting nonsecure warnings when she views YPN pages now in IE and unencrypted warnings in Mozilla/Firefox (something I don’t experience – maybe my Mac can handle something Jen’s PC can’t :-) ).

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YPN tweaks system

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If you can workout what the changes are I’d be interested to hear your theories.

There are a couple of discussion threads on it here and here.

update: Jen details the changes here.

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YPN change their Terms and Conditions

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YPN increase channels and make other Tweaks

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