Best Practices

The Yahoo Native API enables you to programmatically buy, manage and optimize mobile search and native advertising for campaigns across Yahoo Native’s mobile inventory.

Yahoo Ad Tech development and support teams have collected these best practices in an effort to provide you with strategies for optimizing your work with the Yahoo Native API and achieving best results for your mobile and native ad campaigns.

Best practices are grouped into the following categories:

Category

Description

Pre-live

Tips to follow before you go live, like verifying your overall budget, checking for imageUrlHQ and limiting the length of your native video ads to 15 seconds.

Once-live

Tips after you go live, like using compressed files for bulk operations, using the books closed (COB) endpoint and using the Audience cube report to get device information for native ads.

Dot Tags & Custom Audience

Some best practices for dealing with dot tags and custom audiences, like using a single tag/pixel per account and placing the Dot tag only once on a webpage.

Pre-Live

Before going live, follow these best practices:

  1. Verify your overall budget as well as your allocation (daily vs. lifetime) using https://api.gemini.yahoo.com/v3/rest/campaign/?advertiserId=12345678

  2. Check that the destination URL in use is correct.

  3. Perform an ad preview across devices via https://api.admanager.yahoo.com/v3/rest/preview. To get a preview for an existing ad id and deviceType=handheld: https://api.gemini.yahoo.com/v3/rest/preview/?adId=31027685344&displayType=handheld

  4. Check for imageUrlHQ. While imageUrlHQ is not required, not having it will impact both performance and delivery. Many native placements (including homepage and almost all of mobile) require it.

  5. The recommended Daily Frequency Cap for App Install is 2; the weekly cap is 4.

  6. Mention the Brand name in the title.

  7. Try to limit native video ads to 15 seconds, as they drive greater recall and purchase intent than longer video units.

  8. Allow enough time for testing and optimization. Start with 2-4 weeks worth of budget.

Once-Live

Once you are live, follow these best practices:

  1. Use the Audience cube report to get the device information (Mobile vs. Other) for Native ads.

  2. Always use the books closed (COB) endpoint and run reports only after it returns true. This ensures that the data is certified and final.

  3. Run the COB endpoint call around 4 AM of the advertiser’s time zone.

  4. For faster reports, use fewer metadata fields.

  5. For performing A/B tests of ad copies, create one test ad per ad group.

  6. Use compressed files for bulk operations.

  7. Use the API if you’re updating < 500 objects; otherwise, use Bulk.

  8. Use Bulk for larger, less frequent uploads and downloads.

  9. Always use compressed files for bulk operations (upload limit = 1 GB).

  10. On re-try polling of reports, it’s recommended that you wait for 5 minutes and retry again at 1 minute intervals. For small reports that usually return in 5 minutes, abandon the job id after 30 minutes. For longer reports abandon after 2 hours.

Additional Resources - Once-Live

Dot Tags & Custom Audience

When working with dot tags and custom audience, follow these best practices:

  1. Use a single tag/pixel per account. Set the defaultPixel to true for this pixel.

  2. Place the Default tag in the Header of your page.

  3. Ensure the Dot tag is placed on the webpage only once. Placing the same Dot tag twice on the same webpage may cause over counting.

  4. For Resellers, to set the tag, include the child reseller account ID as part of the call https://api.gemini.yahoo.com/v3/rest/tag/40000000?details=true&advertiserId=123456

  5. Understand the conversion rule is not editable by design. This is to avoid advertisers changing the rule definition and losing track of the CPA performance change. The recommendation is to create a new rule and delete the wrong rule.

  6. Note that the Conversion Device field, under the Conversion_rules_stats report, provides device of conversion information, which may or may not be the same as the device of impression/click. This is useful cross-device conversion information.

  7. For lookalikes, the minimum size for a seed audience is 1,000 and the recommended size is 10,000.

Resources

You may wish to check out these other resources dedicated to working with Yahoo Native: