Dave Naffziger's Blog

I’m at Pubcon, sitting in the contextual advertising optimization session and listening to Cody Simms, Sr Product Manager at YPN.

We’re now a good 10 mins into the YPN presentation and Cody is still telling us what contextual advertising is. This is after the slide that told us about the motivations of website operators (cliff notes: we want to make money).
This is an audience of webmasters and site operators. We know what YPN is. We just want to know how to make more money from it.

JenStar gave a good talk just before that went into some details about optimization. To have the ‘about contextual advertising’ presentation follow the ‘how to optimize’ was a little silly.

Update 1

OK, YPN gets it. Cody subsequently dug into several very meaty topics. A few of the tips that I found to be new/useful:

• YPN uses URLs, Navigation menus, meta-description tags and of course text, to determine what a page is about.
• Put short descriptions underneath links
• Try to sprinkle dynamic content on your homepage. This keeps the homepage looking fresh and engages users.
• Don’t put meta tags on your page that aren’t in your text. This looks like spam.
• He also made an offhand remark about nav items helping YPN determine what your domain is about. This suggests that YPN trys to determine what a site is about and then makes targeting decisions based on that. I’m not sure what the impact of this is, but it certainly suggests challenges for multi-topic sites.

As it turns out, the Google presentation was worthless. It was your typical ‘look at our new products’ and ‘we promise to be more open’, but no content on improving your adsense performance.

Update 2

OK, so Yahoo was the only presenter (other than JenStar), that gave us any useful information. Google, ContextWeb & Quigo all each told us about their products and services.  That’s what the exhibit hall is for - to sell us.  The Sessions are to learn.