Yahoo Native (formerly Yahoo Gemini) is Yahoo's offering for mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising (formerly Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! Search Marketing), for placing ads where visitors are, with an emphasis on mobile. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform, offering brand-safe premium content, and advanced technologies to deliver engaging advertising campaigns.
As I've alluded to before, Yahoo Gemini! is particularly well-suited for that extra bit of marketing spend and those last few needed leads and MQLs to get you over the hump. We definitely find that the ROI is well worth it, but it's also not the type of channel that we're gonna drop half of our budget on. The scalability is limited to an extent.
The Sharethrough ad placement was done in a native format that is easy to blend in with the other web content. We designed our ad to make sure it provides a fun informative experience to our customer while selling some of the services.
Advertisers can use Sharethrough to communicate with customers in a way that other ad channels can't.
As advertisers we encourage clients to use content that is interesting to customers instead of just carrying a heavy sales message.
We can use the sharethrough space to create a fun message for customer, however, we always had trouble finding the landing page to take people to. Not every client has enough budget to create a new landing page for every campaign. If Sharethrough allowed for landing page support at a low cost, that would be great.
Another problem was that the placement of the ads were mostly random (at least that's what I was told at the time) It's hard to control where our ad would show up. It is possible that our ad message may be inappropriate with the rest of the content. For example, if this was placed at a news channel, we wouldn't want to have our funny message right next to tragic stories.
More robust and sophisticated reporting capacity: front end metrics are available with different granularities, but lacking in insight to guide optimization strategy
No display/programmatic buying options as yet.
Audience targeting could be improved and audience / lookalike modeling could be improved. That said, geotargeting capabilities are very good.
One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.
They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.
The difference between Sharethrough and the other channels is that Sharethrough allows for a better story telling experience with the multi page carousel experience. We used all the different channels for different types of messages and needs.
Yahoo Gemini is a more robust version of Outbrain and Taboola. It does offer mobile search, which they do not, and you have more control over your targeting, ad formats, and platform preference. Difficulty of campaign setup is pretty minimal on any Native platform, but Gemini does seem to have the least strict approval process, which is nice with both Facebook and Twitter making it difficult to target and run ads for certain products/topics.
