In Yahoo’s current “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, one can wonder about the timing for trotting out Smart Ads. Is it a real advance in search advertising? And even if it is, will it save the search engine? In this article, I’ll look at Smart Ads and consider it in the context of where search is, and where it’s going.
Smart Ads takes advantage of the fact that Yahoo has a huge audience – it’s one of the most-visited sites on the web – and that this audience checks out various areas of Yahoo’s site. It’s easy enough to start by checking your Yahoo Mail, cruise over to Yahoo News, find out the forecast in Yahoo Weather…you get the idea. Users have cookies that follow them around, which is how Yahoo knows about its visitors.
So how does this play into Yahoo Smart Ads? Let’s look at the example that Yahoo gives in its demo of the technology. Joe User lives in Los Angeles, but loves his online casino sites. One day he searches for Las Vegas deals, perhaps dreaming of a visit to Sin City. Later, when he’s looking up Yahoo Weather, he sees a display ad that plays to this interest, telling him about cheap flights to Las Vegas.
This is behavioral targeting, also known as behavioral advertising; I’ve discussed it before on SEO Chat. It can be very effective and perhaps relatively cheap for advertisers. According to Yahoo’s press release, the SmartAds platform “allows advertisers and agencies to design a single set of individual creative components, provide Yahoo! with the artwork and a feed to their entire database of offers, then allow Yahoo!’s SmartAds technology to automatically generate the hundreds – if not thousands – of unique ad combinations based on those components.”
So you can not only appeal to Joe User with dreams of a Vegas vacation, but also Ellie who wants to escape Seattle for sunny Florida, Arthur from Idaho who’s curious about New York’s big city lights, Martin from Minnesota who’s always had a hankering to play cowboy in Texas…you get the idea. I’m using the travel examples mainly because Yahoo is starting its roll out of Smart Ads with its travel industry advertisers in the U.S. It’s not a bad place to start; I just hope the search engine is prepared to address some possible glitches in the approach that may not be obvious at first glance.
Search Engine News 
