Wordstream, the eponymous offering from the company in Boston, MA, provides a free tool for analyzing performance "grading" an Adwords campaign, beyond which, Wordstream Advisor provides (for a fee, though a free trial is available) recommendations to optimize a paid advertising campaign on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines, and place ads. Beyond the platform, Wordstream also offers full account management services, for outsourcing one's campaign, and white labeling for…
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Yahoo Native
Score 6.6 out of 10
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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.
WordStream is so beneficial to a green digital marketing team. If your team is new to paid ads, this will help immensely. It might not be as beneficial for a company that does not use AdWords and is strictly in social ads.
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.
Remove duplicates: The platform has a tool that enables marketers to easily identify duplicate keywords across campaigns, ad groups, and the account; from there duplicates can be paused in an effort to improve quality scores and account performance.
Bid management: WordStream reveals which current keywords can improve campaign performance by increasing and decreasing their bids - updates can be made on the spot.
Ad optimizations: WordStream scans paid search accounts to ensure each ad group is using high performing ads. Marketers can quickly create new ads, and pause ads based on the tool's recommendations.
This is definitely not for a beginner and require knowledge on how PPC/SEM campaigns are run unless you purchase the premium support package that includes a dedicated representative to which they are very helpful.
We had some serious tracking issues and were unable to effectively track the clicks to our website. Because of this, I had to start from scratch and decided not to use WordStream.
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.
I have not had any experience with the customer support team for platform issues, but the account representative checks in with us often and is always available to answer questions. We will usually get on quarterly review calls so that she can share any new updates to the platform and answer questions.
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.
I've never used a system to help with my Google AdWords. This was the first system I had used. WordStream definitely takes the cake though, I have a hard time believing there could be a better system out there. I wouldn't even consider going to look for a new system. I am confident WordStream has owned the Google AdWords space.
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.
