Yahoo! Advertising

What Are Yahoo!'s Advertising Offerings?

Yahoo!'s presentation of its advertising makes it really confusing to understand their offerings. This is because they provide radically different material on different pages, redundant material, conflicting material, and jargony, unclear product descriptions.

Yahoo!'s Advertising According to Its Small Business Page

If you go to the Yahoo! Small Business page, there are only two references to advertising. On the one hand, they promote advertising on both Yahoo! Search and Bing from a single account. On the other hand, they refer to Yahoo! My Display Ads, which are ads run on the Yahoo! network.

Yahoo!'s Advertising According to Its Products & Solutions Page

But if you go to their Products & Solutions page, you get a very different impression. On this page, it states that Yahoo! offers different types of advertising solutions focused on particular audiences, on the one hand, and through a range of 22 products (of which Search Advertising and Yahoo! My Display Ads are only two of the selection) on the other. When you actually look at the products, however, some of them turn out to be subsets of other descriptions, so their aren't actually 22. The lack of categories and subcategories in the products list proves to be misleading, time-consuming, and unhelpful. Some of the descriptions are so unclear that it's very difficult to distinguish exactly what the product or service is and how it may differ from other products and services.

This page lists two Yahoo! partners, Comcast and eBay. But this is confusing because Yahoo! also has an alliance with Microsoft, according to the other page, and here, Microsoft isn't mentioned at all.

The audience targets are:

• Affluents (wealthy people aged 15 to 64 with a household income of greater than $100,00/year)
• Boomer Men (men aged 45 to 64)
• Boomer Women (women aged 45 to 64)
• Men 18 to 34
• Men 18 to 49
• Millennials (people aged 15 to 24)
• Online Dads
• Online Moms
• Women 18 to 34
• Women 18 to 49

Note that there is no category for anyone over age 65, so if your products are made for older adults, it's unclear how Yahoo! would serve you.

The products are:

• Behavioral Targeting—Yahoo! uses visitors clicking and searching behaviors to target ads. Behavioral Targeting is abbreviated BT.
• Clickable Video Ads—This type of ad allows you to re-purpose spots developed for television and provides a clickable interface upon a mouse roll-over that links to your site.
• Consumer Direct—Rooted in the Nielsen Homescan Panel of 70,000 households whose purchases of consumer goods and whose online behavior is tracked with their permission, this service creates a browsing behavior model to help target customers effectively
• Demographic Targeting—Since Yahoo! collects age and gender information when visitors register, you can be supplied with information based on data about demographics, rather than guesses.
• Display Solutions—Yahoo! provides rich media and premium digital cavasses to help create eye-catching ads.
• Geographic Targeting—Yahoo! has tools to pin-point user locations so you can target your ads.
• Interactive Video Ads—Interactivity options include clicking through to a website, triggering coupon downloads, and toolkits, or streaming in players or banners.
• Mobile—Takes advertising to a mobile audience.
• Mobile Sponsored Search—Geo-targeting and carrier selection can help you target mobile search advertising.
• Overlay Video ads—It's not clear how this differs from Clickable Video Ads and Interactive Video Ads.
• Promotions—Promotions that Yahoo! supports include sweepstakes, contests, product samples, surveys, coupons, loyalty programs, partnerships, and branded solutions.
• Retargeting—This service provides ads to consumers who have already expressed interest by readjusting to meet their interests.
• Rich Media—This includes streaming, as well as other content that is sized larger than traditional ads.
• Right Media Exchange—Right Media Exchange is a display advertising exchange platform.
• Search Advertising—Only when you click on this link and get to its page to you see that this provides online advertising on Bing and partner sites as well as Yahoo! It is this type of ad that people who sign up for web hosting often receive credits for as part of their hosting package.
• Search. Customers with a monthly budget for advertising of less than $5000 are asked to visit the Microsoft Advertising adCenter site.
• Smart Ads—These are individually selected ads personalized for each customer based on stereotypes of demographics.
• Targeting Solutions—This seems to be a catch-all for Demographic Targeting, Behavioral Targeting, Geographic Targeting, as well as some others: in other words, it overlaps with some products that have been mentioned already in the list.
• Video Advertising Solutions—This service, which makes the claim that customers who watch videos can't stop after one, goes beyond pre-roll ads, including the types of ads that are interactive, clickable, and include overlays, which have been addressed in earlier product descriptions.
• Yahoo! Analytics—Yahoo! provides a "Buzz Index" an enterprise web analytics solution, and partners with online research companies, as well as providing results tracking.
• Yahoo! My Display Ads—Provides ad templates for ads that appear on the Yahoo! network. How it relates to the other products is unclear.
• Yahoo! Network Plus—The description doesn't clarify how the Network Plus is distinguished from what is referred to in other places as the "Yahoo! Network." It includes Yahoo! sites and publisher partners' sites. The list of partners here includes Comcast, but not eBay, and also AT&T and Verizon - so that contradicts the list of partners that only has Comcast and eBay.
• Yahoo! Web Analytics—How is this different from "Yahoo! Analytics" listed above? It seems to be a subset.

Sources

http://advertising.yahoo.com/products-solutions

http://advertisingcentral.yahoo.com/smallbusiness