As a member of Yahoo’s Smart Ads program, PointRoll will use Yahoo’s reach and targeting capabilities to provide more customized, relevant and scalable rich media campaigns. PointRoll will also use its ShopLocal retail ad program to offer improved Smart Ads for retail advertisers.

“By partnering with Yahoo, PointRoll can offer marketers new opportunities to quickly and efficiently deliver behaviorally targeted rich media ads to the right audiences,” said Jason Tafler, CEO of PointRoll. ”

“As recent Dynamic Logic data illustrates, rich media outperforms standard Flash and gif ads. With Yahoo’s Smart Ads program, PointRoll helps brands auto-optimize creative and targeting to greatly improve the relevance of their campaigns and get the most out of every impression.”

Smart Ads can be used in any vertical industry, but Yahoo says it has seen success within the retail industry, where many advertisers are looking for new ways to reach consumers.

Testing Smart Ads with ShopLocal retail ad content has shown improved campaign performance for retail advertisers such as CVS and Kohl’s. These advertisers saw gains in click performance, conversion and overall return on investment.

Yahoo sites attracted 154 million unique visitors in June, each spending an average of 4.6 hours on the properties, according to comScore.

]]> http://www.smallbusinessitonline.info/2009/08/yahoo-signs-on-pointroll-to-smart-ads-program/feed/ 0 http://www.smallbusinessitonline.info/2009/08/google-rolling-out-adsense-relevancy-improvements/ http://www.smallbusinessitonline.info/2009/08/google-rolling-out-adsense-relevancy-improvements/#comments Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:57:53 +0000 admin http://www.smallbusinessitonline.info/?p=34 Google announced (subtly) that it is rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities to more accurately match relevant ads to AdSense publishers’ pages.

Unfortunately, not many details about these enhancements were given away, but Google says AdSense publishers will not have to update their AdSense accounts or ad code. Changes will be applied automatically.

“Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance,” says AdSense Product Manager Woojin Kim. “In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.”

The changes will not affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites. Placement-targeted ads that advertisers bid on to appear specifically on your page, for example, will continue to appear.

These relevancy-determining changes are not the only thing the AdSense team has been up to. This week, they announced that they have tweaked the default fonts for different ad formats, in order to trigger better performance. Category filtering was also announced for AdSense for Feeds.