Search on Native

Search on native is a new supply for search campaigns in the US. It makes it easier for advertisers to extend reach and performance by showing their ads on our native supply, including Yahoo’s homepage, News, Finance and our publisher partners, to consumers who have signaled intent, related to your product or service through a search query on Yahoo Search.

Ad creatives, with the additional of an optional image, and landing pages are all based on your search campaigns and are tailored to the individual query that the consumer performed, enabling stronger personalization and user engagement. Advertisers can maintain control by changing the bid adjustments at the keyword level to help optimize their return on ad spend.

We believe that we can make search advertising better by layering our deep understanding of consumers’ interests and going beyond the search results page.

Technical Considerations

The following are some of the technical considerations when working with SRN:

  • Yahoo can add an image at the account level that will serve for Native ads where applicable. Also, you may add images to your existing ads that will serve in their specific instance.

  • The bid is controlled via the bid modifier on the campaign object.

  • By default, Yahoo will set the Search Retargeting bid modifier to ( -70%).

  • This setting is called Search retargeting Bid Modifier on the campaign settings screen in the UI.

  • For the API, the attribute subChannelModifier was added to the campaign object.

  • For a campaign to be eligible to run on Search on Native, the campaign channel must be set to Search_ONLY and the subchannel may be SRN_and_Search, or SRN_ONLY.

Note

The campaign must be created as a search campaign. Native campaigns are not compatible with this feature.

Before this functionality was added, you may have elected to only serve traffic on the Search channel. With this new feature, you will be seeing Native traffic at the keyword level. This requires rethinking through your current technical setup.

Reporting, tracking and bidding are the key areas that are impacted by this change, as discussed in the next sections.

Reporting

Since keywords could not serve on Native prior to this change, the keyword_stats report was limited to Search traffic. With this new functionality, we have made some important changes, as described below.

  1. We have added the field Source to the keyword_stats cube to allow you to discern traffic between Search and Native. Please add this column if you would like to see the data broken out into the respective channels.

  2. The keyword_stats will continue to be defaultly filtered to Search traffic. If you would like to see both Search and Native data, you will have to implement the filter below in addition to the column noted in the previous step:

 {
    "field": "Source",
    "operator": "IN",
    "values": [1,2]
}

  1. If you are calling the performance_stats cube, and do not currently call the Source field, please add it in order to allow you to discern ad traffic between Search and Native channels. Without adding the column and/or filtering by Source, the data for each channel will be aggregated for each ad id.

Tracking

To help support proper click-time attribution, we recommend implementing the URL macros described below. In addition to modifying the ad and/or keyword Landing URLs, the corresponding attribution logic on your website may need to be updated.

These are the recommended URL macros:

{network} - This macro will return values of s or n representing Search and Native, respectively as the source of the click.

Additionally, Native & SearchNative & Search supports:

{ifsearch:value} - This macro will allow you to set a specific value when the ad is served on the Search Channel.

{ifcontent:value} - This macro will allow you to set a specific value when the ad is served on the Native Channel.

Bidding

In most cases, if you don’t update your Reporting and Tracking processes as outlined above, you will see an increase of clicks and conversions without the corresponding traffic and spend.

For those bidding on conversions, this will tend to inflate your search bids. Please consider the options above to maintain proper ROI.

To manage bids via the API, you will need to support the new attribute subChannelModifier that was added to the campaign object.

The attribute will accept a decimal value from .1 to 2 (displayed in UI as -90% to 100%).

Targeting

The supported targeting options:

  • Geo location (Country, State, DMA). We only serve on US.

  • Language. We only serve English campaigns.

  • Ad scheduling

  • Device bid modifiers

The following are not supported:

  • Geo location (city, zip, radius)

  • Age/Gender

  • Custom audience or segments

  • Supply group

  • OS version

  • Connection type

Questions

If you have questions or need further information, you can work with your Yahoo Native representative. If you do not have a direct representative, contact the Solutions Engineering team at <solutionsengineering@yahooinc.com>.