Today, Yahoo formally announced the release of Yahoo Product Ads, a new solution aimed at giving advertisers the ability to create and serve product image-based ads across Yahoo search and display.
With the addition, Yahoo adds a powerful format to its suite for advertisers to take advantage of across its network. Here’s what advertisers can expect in terms of search and display capabilities.
Similar to the Search Product Ad Formats Advertisers Know
Yahoo Product Ads are similar to those on Google and Bing when it comes to search, providing users with ads that include product images, titles, and pricing information.
We’ve been fortunate enough to test the Beta version of Yahoo Product Ads over the past few months, and while the traffic volume has been limited thus far, we believe performance relative to non-brand text ads will likely be similar to what we’ve observed on other search engines.
Product ads have grown significantly for AdWords and Bing Ads over the past couple of years, and accounted for 60% of all Google non-brand traffic in Q3 according to our Digital Marketing Report.
Bing Product Ads, just rolled out in 2013, accounted for 24% of all Bing Ads non-brand traffic in Q3. In terms of pure click growth, Bing Product Ads grew 332% year-over-year for the quarter.
Bing recently announced a move to begin showing product ads for Bing mobile searches. However, while Bing Product Ads will continue to be eligible to serve for Yahoo desktop and tablet searches, only Yahoo Product Ads will show for Yahoo phone searches.
If the growth of the product ad format for AdWords and Bing Ads are good examples of what we can expect from Yahoo’s product ad format, it may account for a decent share of Gemini traffic as early as next Q4.
And as there is no other way to serve product ads on Yahoo phone searches, the mobile format will drive incremental traffic and orders for advertisers from Yahoo’s mobile traffic.
Yahoo’s share of organic traffic coming from mobile devices was just below that of Google but significantly higher than Bing in Q3, indicating a strong share of Yahoo’s total query volume occurs on mobile devices.
Yahoo Product Ads Offer Unique Display Targeting Opportunities
On the display side, Yahoo Product Ads offer advertisers the ability to reach potential customers across the WEB with ads displaying rich images of products. Speaking with Yahoo representatives, these ads have significantly outperformed standard banner ads on the Yahoo display network in early tests in terms of return on ad spend.
In terms of targeting, advertisers will be able to not only remarket to past site visitors with product ads across Yahoo’s display network, but also target prospects based on Yahoo’s knowledge of their interests and attributes, a unique offering of the Yahoo format compared to other search engine product ads.
While advertisers will have the ability to specify different categories of products be shown to different audiences, Yahoo will automatically optimize ad layout and products shown based on performance.
Aside from driving users to product pages, advertisers will also have the ability to trigger email signup boxes within these ads, an interesting possibility for driving direct response.
Conclusion
In both search and display, product ad formats are becoming a larger part of advertiser investment all the time for their appeal to users and solid conversion rates.
As such, it comes as no surprise that Yahoo would roll out their own version for advertisers to use in reaching users across Yahoo search and display.
While it may take some time for the format to truly ramp up in search, there is certainly great potential as evidenced by Google and Bing’s success with product ads in search.
In display, Yahoo’s unique product ad prospecting opportunity offers advertisers a new possibility for driving direct response out of prospective customers. If Yahoo’s early tests showing better return from product ads than traditional banner ads in display hold true for most advertisers, marketers will certainly look to take advantage of the format in the weeks and months to come.
