Yahoo! Advertising Results

The Yahoo Ad Campaigns:

1. Paid Yahoo! Directory Listing

For $299 you can submit your site to Yahoo! in hopes of getting it into their huge directory. Simply put, the Yahoo! directory is one of the busiest on the planet. And a good listing will bring you lots of targeted traffic. My own results with a Yahoo! directory listing have been excellent. But you MUST do it right, because a lousy listing is a waste of money.

To get my own good listing, I simply read this tutorial right here at this companion site before submitting. Within a week or so I had a great ranking. Ever since, the traffic has been steady and reliable, bringing hundreds of targeted visitors each week. I highly recommend you take the few hours it takes to do it right, and get your site into the Yahoo directory. It is worth the $299 investment.

Or, if you do not have the funds, you should be able to get into the Yahoo! search results using Inktomi's search/submit service which currently costs just $39 per URL. Inktomi powers searches through Hotbot, MSN, About and sometime during 2004, Yahoo! New sites are listed in 48 hours. And your site should show up in Yahoo! when they switch from using Google results to their own Inktomi powered results.

2. Yahoo! Directory "Sponsor" Listing

I figured that since my directory listing was pulling such great traffic, I'd spend a little more money and try Yahoo's "sponsored site option" for an additional $300 per month. And frankly, this option was a bit of a disappointment. The results were fair at best. Actually, the campaign was doing a bit better than break-even until Yahoo snuck in paid sponsor listings from overture.com above their own paid sponsor section. The traffic dropped off and I cancelled this extra sponsor listing. In my opinion $300 a month is quite expensive for a single link that is not given priority.

3. YahooGroups Email Campaign

Next I invested money in "top sponsorship advertising" via the YahooGroups newsletter network. Man, what a disappointing experience. The campaign cost $5000, MUCH more than I'm used to spending on advertising. But they promised 4.5 million impressions which should have resulted in about 25,000 visitors, even at a conservative estimate. Unfortunately I received, get this... less that 2000 clicks! Talk about a poor result!

And to make matters worse, when I wrote to my ad rep and explained that even a .1% (That's 1/10 of a percent) click through rate would have delivered 5000 visitors, they basically said, sorry but the campaign is over. To make matters worse, they could not show me any stats to prove that the 4.5 million impressions were delivered. Needless to say, this campaign was a bust and did not even get to break-even. Actually, it netted a loss of about $2000.

Overall results:

Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? It is not necessarily true in advertising! My well written Yahoo! directory listing that I paid a one-time $299 fee for, nets me thousands of dollars every quarter. The $300 a month sponsor listing barely broke even each month. And the $5000 YahooGroups email campaign actually lost money. This just goes to show you that you must always measure results when advertising. Otherwise you'd repeat ad buying mistakes over and over without knowing it. Track your visitors and sales from each ad you place and you'll find the bargains to continue using, and the dogs to drop at the pound!