Ok so I recently opened up a new site, it’s been online for a few months now. First off, my main ad-serving network I used was YPN, which was decent, but the revenue per click was pretty low. Yahoo once paid a lot! I usually got 1.00 - 2.00 clicks, but clicks suddenly dropped to the $0.10 range. So I definitely had to do some research to increase my RPC.
First I used a feature in YPN that allows me to track which ad medium was clicked by creating channels. Once I created the channels, I was able to track which ads were performing and which ads were not. Through my experiment, it turned out my 468×60 ads (displayed in the center of my page), and my 728×90 ads on the top of the page were performing the best. The ads running on my content pages and on the sides were doing the worst. I replaced those ads with CPM ads because they were averaging only 0.2 clicks per day. With CPM ads, my revenue climbed a bit, but not that much. I was only getting about 0.20 CPM, but it was better than what I was getting with Yahoo. Of course not everyone can do this, but I find that it’s a good alternative if you can’t make money off of Yahoo.
Now I realized that the ads that I targeted yielded pretty low RPC (revenue per click), because of this I tried targeting different areas for 2 weeks. Initially my RPC climbed from 0.11 to 0.26, which more than doubled my income per day. Basically, if you find yourself with a low RPC, try to target different ad categories. Try each ad category for a week and see which one performs the best for you. I tried about 3 or 4 ad categories and found one that was consistently performing at about $0.58 (and getting some 1.50 clicks) and I kept that one.
Just a hint about the Ad Targeting. The less interesting the ad, the more RPC you will get. I’ve seen that targeting entertainment type ads yields a pretty low RPC, while ads such as Finance will yield a higher RPC. This is probably due to the fact that those “boring” keywords are harder to get clicks for. Another hint, Yahoo ad targeting only works to a certain extent, but Yahoo will also crawl your site and take some keywords and match ads to that (similar to Adsense), however, these ads are sometimes pretty badly matched to your site’s content (in my case atleast).
Small niche sites will probably find better success using Google Adsense since the targeting will work better. Yahoo, being in its beta stage, still isn’t as great with serving truly relevant ads. You can also try using a non-contextual text ad program like Adbrite, which will allow you to serve the usual “raunchy” type ads such as the “Hot Sexy Singles” ads that many sites are displaying. These can usually get you more clicks.
Like with most contextual ad programs, Yahoo works best when it’s at the top of the fold (meaning at the top of your website without having to scroll). The results in my ad channels showed the same result.
Then include some good blending techniques to make the Yahoo Ad seem to mix with the rest of your site.
Play around with the targeting! You’re not going to be perfect, so just try every single one of them for a week or so until you get the ones that are yielding 1.00 + clicks. I’ve been doing just this, and I’m finally getting $1.94 clicks.
Good luck with your YPN endeavors.
