Native Advertising Joins the Search Family with Yahoo Gemini

When marketers talk about their Search strategies, one can expect to hear the usual suspects mentioned: “combining traditional search with social is big”, “don’t forget about optimizing for mobile search”, but few ever expect to hear about native ads in their Search conversations. Native ads usually fall under the category of display advertising, but today they are joining forces with mobile search for the first time through Yahoo’s innovative advertising solution called Gemini.

Native ads have always appealed to advertisers with the way they blend into the natural flow of editorial content and their high engagement factor with consumers. With native advertising boasting a 3.6x lift over traditional display ads for branded search activity and 6x lift for generic search activity according to Yahoo, it’s not surprising advertisers want to include native ads into their advertising strategy. For advertisers new to native, Gemini makes it easy to get started, as it allows advertisers to buy, manage, and optimize their native and mobile search ads all in one place. By combining the power of native ads with the popularity of mobile search ads, advertisers are able to not only reach targeted audience across desktop, mobile and tablets, but also provide them with a compelling ad experience.

To help advertisers get started with Yahoo Gemini, we’ve provided three helpful tips:

1. Reap the benefits of an early start

Early adopters of Gemini are already seeing great results. One major hotel brand raves about generating more leads and revenues in just one week from advertising on Gemini. Gemini provides advertisers access to the majority of Yahoo’s mobile inventory, with mobile accounting for 39% of Yahoo’s searches. As more advertisers learn about the substantial opportunity that is Gemini, it makes sense to get in early to beat your competition to the punch, take advantage of lower CPCs, and have more time to fine-tune your ad performance.

2. Understand your audience

With the combination of native and mobile search, advertisers have the ability to hit audiences at different parts of the marketing funnel. Native content on Gemini is displayed on the Yahoo homepage as well as Yahoo properties like Mail, Mobile Search, News, Sports, Finance, Celebrity, Movies, TV, Music, Travel, Autos, and My Yahoo. This reach allows you to hit a broader audience and it may make sense to create ads that are geared towards creating brand awareness. Mobile search ads on the other hand appear according to keyword searches, making it a good place to display more customized ads that are focused on specific products or information that you believe your targeted audience is interested in.

3. Work with a third party platform to see it all

While Gemini allows advertisers to bring together native ads with mobile search ads, advertisers can gain even more insight by combining their Gemini campaigns with the rest of their advertising campaigns. By having all their search, social and display campaigns consolidated in one place, advertisers are provided with a truly comprehensive picture of how their advertising efforts are performing. Additionally, third party platforms allow advertisers to easily clone ads from one publisher to another and also sync between publishers and the platform to ensure consistency across both and minimize errors.

Earlier this week, Marin announced an exclusive partnership with Yahoo Gemini. For more information on how Marin can help with your Gemini campaigns, click here.