Do You Know Where Your Ads Are?

New feature helps you see how your traffic performs

Would you like to know where your ads are running? Yahoo! is launching some new features that will let you know which Yahoo! partners are providing you traffic, and charge you according to the performance of the traffic you receive.

There you are
You probably know that your ads can appear not only on Yahoo, but on partners throughout our distribution network, and that you can block them if they’re not performing for you. But until now, if you didn’t have a pretty good head for web measurement stuff, you probably didn’t know which traffic sources were working for you. Now our Ad Delivery Report will let you see how your ads are performing on various partners, and use that information to block the partners who don’t give you what you need.

The Ad Delivery Report shows you not only your traffic sources—whether that be Yahoo! or some of our partners—but also how your traffic from those sources converts. Combined with one of our analytics options, you can track measurements such as impressions, click-throughs, conversions and return on ad spend. You can also filter the results by account, domain, distribution channel and tactic.

If you find traffic sources that you don’t want, you can enter the domains in our Blocked Domains tool. Keep in mind that you can block a maximum of 500 domains, so pick the domains that are most important for you to block based on the amount and performance of traffic. Make sure you’re getting enough traffic on those domains to make informed decisions about their performance, and keep in mind that when you block domains you reduce the traffic you’re likely to receive, too.

You can get started with the Ad Delivery Report by clicking on the “Reports” tab in the Sponsored Search interface, or learn more about how to use it in our help center.

Pay for what you get
As you’ll see when you start looking at your Ad Delivery Report, not every partner will perform the same for you. We’ve discounted our click charges accordingly for some time now. We’re now expanding the adjustments we make to our click charges based on our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network.

This will include deeper discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic, and potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic—in other words, your click charges will be more closely aligned to the performance of the traffic you receive.

How does it affect you? Based on our analysis, we expect that most advertisers will see click charges drop or remain unchanged, while a small fraction of advertisers may experience an increase in click charges. These adjustments are based on the performance of the traffic source, and won’t be affected by the quality of your ads. And, as always, you will never pay more for a click than the amount you set as your bid.

Now in a town near you
Sponsored Search has several new features that let you manage your billing and account information more easily. You can now edit your payment methods more simply, such as when you want to swap a credit card out for another, and more easily set an appropriate automatic charge amount  to fund your account when your balance gets low. If you’ve just signed up with us using a promotional code, the system will let you see which credits are being applied to your account, along with their status. For more details about these changes, see what’s new in Sponsored Search.

We’ve also updated our geographic targeting feature. It already let you get specific in your campaigns by allowing targeting down to the city or ZIP code levels, and it’s now even more specific with the addition of 746 new cities. So, if you were dying to target the good folks of Beverly Hills, Calif. or San Benito, Texas, today is your lucky day.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor