Reach and Performance¶

Yahoo Ad Tech introduces a new targeting feature enhancement for Yahoo Preferred Network (Native) advertisers: Reach and Performance.

This new feature enhancement takes advantage of a proprietary machine learning algorithm developed by Yahoo Native that enables advertisers to expand their reach beyond targeted audience segments that advertisers have specified for new and existing Native ad campaigns.

That means, you can now increase reach to better performing audiences. You’ll be able to identify more audiences that produce a greater number of conversions at the same or lower cost, thus increasing reach and performance.

Important

This feature enhancement provides a scalable solution to advertisers who target smaller and more niche audiences, enabling campaigns that may struggle to scale because they target relatively smaller segments.

Reach and Performance as shown in the Define your audience settings panel for new ad campaigns

Important

By enabling this, as shown in the Campaign settings panel, you’ll help improve your campaign performance by increasing its reach to audiences that yield conversions at a lower or at the same cost per conversion. Note that this feature enhancement supports all audience types.

How It Works¶

Using this feature, which is enabled by default, audiences are targeted if your CPA goal is lower than or equal to specifically targeted audiences. If that occurs, Reach and Performance will increase spend on the better performing expanded audience.

The expansion of targeting depends on the CPA the system calculates for a targeted audience. Your originally targeted audiences are still targeted, however.

Keep in mind that your CPA goal is not the desired CPA that you’ve specified but rather, the CPA benchmark observed by the system as it spends the budget on the targeted audience. You can’t enter a CPA goal for Reach and Performance.

Ultimately, you can expect decreases in overall CPA while conversions can be expected to increase over time.

Note

The originally targeted audience is still active, in any case. The Reach and Performance algorithm will search for additional audiences and divert your budget to them if they are relevant. The originally targeted audience is not eliminated, just the budget to it is reduced.

Targeting & Campaign Bidding Types¶

The following table describes the types of targeting and campaign bidding that work and do not work with Reach and Performance:

Type	Works With	Doesn’t Work With
Targeting	All Audiences
Campaign bidding	Manual CPC Enhanced CPC (eCPC)	DPA (retargeting, broad audiences) KRT / SoN (keyword retargeting or Search on Yahoo Native Ads) Target CPA Max conversions CPM or oCPM CPV

Important

For Manual CPC and eCPC campaign types, Reach and Performance will measure the performance (CPA) of the originally targeted audiences and will then attempt to find expanded audiences that perform similarly or better than the original. If those audiences are found, it will begin to divert budget to them.

Implementation Details¶

Reach and Performance is ACTIVE by default for new ad campaigns and PAUSED when turned off and disabled.

Note

If you wish, you can disable this functionality in your Yahoo Native ads campaign settings. There may be specific cases where the original targeting is one that makes sense for a particular campaign and you may not wish to expand it to other segments: for example, if the creative design is somehow explicitly tied to the segment audience, like a campaign targeting, for instance, sports fans of a specific club with explicit language in the creative that references the club membership of the viewer.

Native Ads API & BULK Support¶

The Yahoo Native Ads API provides expanded targeting support for the following targeting types:

Reach and Performance=FALSE
UNKNOWN Gender=FALSE
UNKNOWN Age=FALSE

Bulk support for these targeting types is provided for Campaigns and Ad Groups. Refer to the documentation on those pages for more information.

Endpoint¶

Resource URI

https://api.gemini.yahoo.com/v3/rest/targetingattribute/

Enable Reach and Performance in Your Campaigns¶

Method: To create a new ad that supports a targeting type, make a POST call with the Ad object to this endpoint:

https://api.gemini.yahoo.com/v3/rest/targetingattribute/

The response will be the newly created ad with a targeting type.

Note

To disable Reach and Performance in the API, set STRICT_SEGMENT_TARGETING to TRUE.

Note

To include UNKNOWN Gender or UNKNOWN Age in the API, ensure that you set STRICT_GENDER_TARGETING or STRICT_AGE_TARGETING to FALSE.

For example:

Data passed:
{
    "type": "STRICT_GENDER_TARGETING",
    "advertiserId": 1000899406,
    "status": "ACTIVE",
    "parentType": "CAMPAIGN",
    "parentId": 100007431053,
    "exclude": "FALSE",
    "value": "true"
}
Response:
{
   "errors": null,
   "timestamp": "2021-02-04 22:39:47",
   "response": {
       "type": "STRICT_GENDER_TARGETING",
       "status": "ACTIVE",
       "id": 100000009180029,
       "lastUpdateDate": 1604454181830,
       "createdDate": 1604454181830,
       "advertiserId": 1000899406,
       "parentType": "CAMPAIGN",
       "parentId": 100007431053,
       "value": "true"
   }

Update Existing Targeting Attributes¶

Method: For targeting attributes, the only fields that can be updated are status and value. You can do this by making a PUT call with one or more TargetingAttribute, passing the id in the request body. For anything else, including updating the value field, the existing targeting attribute must be deleted and a new one should be created with the desired values.

Dive Deeper¶

The Reach and Performance algorithm uses a portion of your budget on a better performing audience (i.e., the expanded audience) outside of the specifically targeted audience (i.e., the seed audience).

The sequence of programmatic events:

The algorithm measures the CPA of the seed audience to serve as a target CPA for the expanded audience. The expanded audience will have a target CPA lower than or equal to that of the seed audience.
If the algorithm can’t find any expanded audience that meets the seed audience CPA target, then the budget is spent entirely on the seed audience.
If the algorithm can find expanded audiences that meet the seed audience CPA target, the algorithm will spend up to 80% of the budget on the better performing expanded audience. In this case, you can expect overall CPA to decrease and conversions to increase over time.

Note

For Manual CPC and eCPC campaigns, the CPA target will be established by what the model reaches for the seed audience.

As far as Reporting, the system presents EXPANDED for the audiences that have been reached but not targeted – and only for the expanded targeting campaigns.

Learn More¶

For more information on modifying bids and using bid adjustments, refer to:

FAQs¶

When should I enable Reach and Performance?¶

By design, expanded audiences are only targeted when they have a CPA lower than or equal to that of your specifically targeted audience. With that in mind, we recommend that you enable Reach and Performance whenever it is available.

Reach and Performance is not available for all campaign objectives, namely, DPA (both retargeting and broad audiences) and keyword retargeting.

Reach and Performance is also not available for certain bid strategies, such as oCPC (i.e., Target CPA), maximum conversions, and CPM/oCPM.

For performance campaigns (i.e., those manually optimized to conversions), is the best practice to keep Reach and Performance switched on?¶

Reach and Performance will improve performance (i.e., increase conversions and reduce CPA). It is recommended that you enable it for such cases.

If you have concerns about enabling Reach and Performance, are there use cases where Reach and Performance is not recommended?¶

We recommend Reach and Performance for all advertisers, although there may be unique exceptions (for example, if the creative design is explicitly tied to a specific segment audience).

What if you don’t have a Dot Tag or you don’t get conversions?¶

Reach and Performance still works. In this case, we apply a similar logic as the model of Enhanced CPC. The algorithm infers CPA from targeted users’ behavior across the ad network.

If you have Dot, will Reach and Performance incorporate signals from it, or will it still just rely on creative and user signals?¶

Yes, signals from Dot will be used if Dot data is available.

Does Reach and Performance ever change my bids?¶

In some instances when using Manual CPC, Reach and Performance can lower (but never raise) a bid in order to reach a lower CPA goal for the Expanded audience.

Are Predictive Audiences eligible for Reach and Performance?¶

No. Predictive Audiences are a Custom Audience which is not eligible for Reach and Performance.

Will Reach and Performance result in campaigns for Native ads showing large amounts of spend against an audience named “unknown”?¶

Reach and Performance will result with campaigns showing spend against an audience named Expanded. Specifically for cases that the spend was on an audience with no known Yahoo Native audience segments, it will show as Unknown.