Smaato is a supply-side publisher platform (SSP) from the Verve Group since the 2021 acquisition.
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Yahoo Native
Score 6.7 out of 10
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Yahoo Native (formerly Yahoo Gemini) is Yahoo's offering for mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising (formerly Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! Search Marketing), for placing ads where visitors are, with an emphasis on mobile. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform, offering brand-safe premium content, and advanced technologies to deliver engaging advertising campaigns.
Smaato is very well suited for user acquisition and retargeting companies. Their overlap in terms of audiences and publishers with other exchanges is very limited, which makes it a great alternative when you need to scale a campaign and want to maintain your frequency cap. They work very well in branding campaigns as well as performance campaigns.
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.
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.
Smaato has a UI where you can control your line items on the traffic you want to receive. That is a key unique selling point that other SSPs don't offer. Most of the items that you will need like reporting can be done on a self serve manner and that is a big plus, specifically for changes that need to happen really fast and you don't need to deal with account managers that may take some time to answer emails.
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.
Smaato's account management team is very professional. They are quite fast in terms of customer support, which is very helpful. One item that stands out is that they are willing to understand what you need for each campaign and what is the best way to move forward. They don't just jump quickly into trying to upsell more of Smaato's products (audiences, data) like other SSPs do.
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.
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.
