Yahoo Ads supports mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising, and is a solution for placing ads where visitors are. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform.
Good for instances where search campaigns are driving poor overall traffic. Campaigns for awareness work well, and you have pretty good control of how your ads look without having to do too much work. We've used this successfully for law, financial services, and political campaigns effectively. With Twitter banning political ads, and Facebook becoming increasingly strict on their approval guidelines, this may turn into the best alternative. Would not necessarily recommend for ecommerce campaigns, or lead based campaign where keeping cost per conversion down is a primary objective.
The Sharethrough ad placement was done in a native format that is easy to blend in with the other web content. We designed our ad to make sure it provides a fun informative experience to our customer while selling some of the services.
Advertisers can use Sharethrough to communicate with customers in a way that other ad channels can't.
As advertisers we encourage clients to use content that is interesting to customers instead of just carrying a heavy sales message.
We can use the sharethrough space to create a fun message for customer, however, we always had trouble finding the landing page to take people to. Not every client has enough budget to create a new landing page for every campaign. If Sharethrough allowed for landing page support at a low cost, that would be great.
Another problem was that the placement of the ads were mostly random (at least that's what I was told at the time) It's hard to control where our ad would show up. It is possible that our ad message may be inappropriate with the rest of the content. For example, if this was placed at a news channel, we wouldn't want to have our funny message right next to tragic stories.
No traffic -- despite a high ROI, the lack of overall spend led to us eventually remove support for the channel from our services.
Nothing to differentiate it from other paid platforms -- Gemini didn't particularly offer anything new or novel that made it worth using over Bing and Google.
One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.
They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.
The difference between Sharethrough and the other channels is that Sharethrough allows for a better story telling experience with the multi page carousel experience. We used all the different channels for different types of messages and needs.
Yahoo Gemini! does stack up well against its competitors in the smaller spending realms. We've never been able to justify the ROI when we try to scale it up to even 10% - 15% of our spend. No, we've found that it's much better as a tangential win than a mainstream channel.
