Written on October 14th, 2005 at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse
Issues with Rotating YPN and AdSense
Tim has a very useful post for those of you who are rotating Adsense and YPN ads on your site (ie having each ad program show up on every second impression.
He was having some problems with getting PSA ads on YPN and found that part of the problem was the fact he was rotating ads. He writes:
‘So the next logical question was why am I getting PSAs on YPN? After having a few of the YPN engineers look at my site they figured out the reason it was getting PSAs was because I was rotating pageviews between YPN ads and AdSense ads. Basically the YPN bot that crawls pages to determine the content was getting confused because the page content was constantly changing and the YPN ads were there one second and gone the next. So each time a YPN ad was displayed it triggered a new “content review” and PSAs would be displayed.’
To find the solution to the problem head over to his post at Rotating YPN and AdSense is a Bad Idea.
13 Responses to “Issues with Rotating YPN and AdSense”
Matt
October 14th, 2005 1:42 am
I’m not entirely positive, but I suspect that I am having a similar issue with the minimalls being on my site at the same time as AdSense. The AdSense ads seem to be getting confused. I’m heading over to read Tim’s post and see if it applies. My AdSense ads used to be very nicely targeted, whereas since I put the minimalls on my site, they’ve definitely lost a lot of their targeting specificity.
Comic Strip Blogger
October 14th, 2005 2:05 am
I am running YPN and I must say that targetting of YPN is million times smaller than of AdSense… and bad targetting is bad for clickthroughs… rotating on the same page? It’s not good idea anyway. Better to have only one kind for one page and other for another page.
Comic Strip Blogger
October 14th, 2005 2:06 am
I am running YPN and I must say that targetting of YPN is million times smaller than of AdSense… and bad targetting is bad for clickthroughs… rotating on the same page? It’s not good idea anyway. Better to have only one kind for one page and other for another page.
Doug
October 14th, 2005 2:33 am
Not a good idea? It makes the most sense. I don’t get why the bots would require the adcode to be there permanently. Do they key the publisher’s id in the code to the URL and the database storing all of this contextual data? If the rotation was done via JavaScript rather than server-side, wouldn’t the ad code always be there and therefore this problem should not exist. I’d be interested in hearing some follow up to this.
I’m also interested if anyone else can confirm that a similar issue exists with Google. If not, it would seem to be a flaw of sorts on Yahoo’s implementation.
Tim Flight
October 14th, 2005 2:45 am
Doug, I agree that it seems to be a flaw with Yahoo’s implementation and that it doesn’t affect AdSense ads. While from a comparison point of view rotating makes sense, the YPN bot didn’t like it. Apparently when the YPN bot visits the page and doesn’t see YPN ads (when it has rotated to AdSense ads) that it throws out any targeting/content information it has learned since it thinks you are no longer displaying their ads on that page. There might be a little more to the story, however I can say with certainty that once I reduced the amount of rotation and kept the YPN ads there for a couple of hours the PSAs went away (where they had been there before for a week or more) and the ads became much more targeted again.
Doug
October 14th, 2005 3:07 am
That’s what I mean with my Javascript rotation question though.Bots and spiders don’t useually read teh output generated by the JS, so if the adcode were present and rotation were handled by an encapulating JS function, all indications should show that the Yahoo code is there. I’m not part of YPN yet, so I can’t try it out myself, but I am interested because I plan to try YPN out and would want to rotate ads on a page load basis as well. That’s really what makes sense, especially since my main site is a niche site and Google has only a limited number of ads for most of my content.
AdMoolah News and Views » Is Rotating YPN and AdSense a Bad Idea?
October 14th, 2005 3:32 am
[…] (Found via enternetusers) […]
Elliott C. Back
October 14th, 2005 3:48 am
If new content triggers re-evaluation and PSAs of the YPN ads, then aren’t blogs with comments going to trigger PSAs with each new comment? So, the more popular the blog, the more unsuitable it will be for yahoo advertising. Interesting theory…
wwinfo
October 14th, 2005 4:25 am
That just suggests you might have to server YPN the same page all the time. Check for UserAgent and/or IP addresses. UserAgent should be sufficient as the YPN adbot should always be the same.
But it is interesting that this would happen.
pcunix
October 14th, 2005 4:29 am
I have no problem rotating YPN ads, though I do not do it every other impression: I do it time based, taking the seconds from the current time and doing a mod 10. I run Google in seconds 1 to 5, and ypn from 6 to 9, then Chitika at 0 (I run Chitika non-contextual with Google also, but these 0 second ones are contextual).
I’ve seen no problem with YPN.
Heloc Blogger
October 14th, 2005 7:56 am
When first accepted into YPN, I started out rotating ads every hour and was very disappointed with both YPN and Google results. A friend convinced me to try YPN again without rotation and I’m quite happy I did. The rotation thing (at least the way I did it) didn’t work well with either Google or YPN.
Gaurav
October 14th, 2005 1:01 pm
I think the ads should be rotated atleast after 12 hours (or may be 24 hrs is good)
One can also rotate Ads once a week or so. I think this would stabalize the stats for YPN and Adsense.
Ad rotation: Using the user-agent header to serve up Google ads to Google and Yahoo! ads to Yahoo!
October 14th, 2005 11:31 pm
[…] Apparently some AdSense publishers who are rotating between AdSense and YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network) ads on the same page are having difficulty with ad targeting when the YPN ads are shown. (Even everyone’s favorite rich blogger, Darren Rowse, felt it worthy to mention it.) The solution that Tim Flight came up with was to rotate the ads based on elapsed time and not on each impression. […]
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