The Yahoo Gemini interface has slowly but surely been gaining speed over the last year. Although Gemini is still small scale in comparison to Google or Bing Ads, it puts a focus on mobile and on native advertising and is continuing to be innovative and creative.
With a new CEO, Yahoo Gemini could be the next major player for Yahoo now that Firefox is in the mix and the Microsoft partnership is in its final years. The question is then, as always, obvious: Is Gemini something that small businesses should be using? If so, why?
What is Gemini for Yahoo?
Yahoo Gemini was introduced one year ago this month, and it has resurfaced back into the news in the SEO sphere. For those who are unfamiliar, Gemini is the only marketplace that brings together mobile search and native advertising. It is now the default option when using Yahoo Ad Manager. The official Yahoo Gemini announcement explained it best:
Advertisers get the performance and ease of search, combined with the scale and creativity of native advertising. By bringing the two together, advertisers can now buy, manage, and optimize their mobile search and native ad spending one place—driving greater performance and higher impact for their businesses and brands.
In other words, with Yahoo Gemini search ads will show up on Yahoo.com and partner sites on tablets and smartphones. The idea here is that buying together, both mobile search and native ads, will allow for better performance metrics for marketers because there will be a higher reach. Again has quite a bit to do with the success of native advertising, which you can learn more about here. In the past, Bing Ads served all of Yahoo’s mobile search traffic. As you might imagine, this has led to some opinions that the partnership was great for Yahoo and terrible for Bing (but more on this in the next section).
You can get started with the Yahoo Gemini interface by setting up a Gemini account. This is where you set up and manage campaigns and budgets and see all of your results. The system will build and deliver your ad to the right audience on its own. Below is a screenshot that might help explain how it works:
The Bing and Yahoo Partnership, Where Yahoo Gemini Comes Into Play
According to a Search Engine Land article, Gemini went from serving roughly 4 percent of mobile search traffic on the Yahoo Bing Network at the beginning of Q3 to 27 percent by the end of Q4 2014. In other words, it has been successful so far, although still small. So what does this mean in terms of Bing Ads?
According to a Search Engine Land article, the traffic and success of Yahoo Gemini is at the expense of mobile ads served by Bing. Yahoo says that Gemini will eventually serve all of its mobile search traffic instead of Bing (currently users see both thanks to the search alliance). It’s going to take a lot of work for Yahoo to take over any of the traffic from Google, but it seems as though moving away from the Microsoft partnership once the 5 years is up is going to be a step in the right direction. Yahoo is clearly being innovative, so it will be interesting to see where they go in the future.
I also recommend checking out this article from Wordstream for more information on how it all works.
What It Means to You
Yahoo has over 800 million users per month, so it’s something to consider. In combination with that statistic, you also have to consider the growth of mobile and the effectiveness of native advertising. According to CopyPress, “Although native advertising isn’t widely accepted by advertisers and publishers, it is supposed to be THE way of advertising by 2016.” That’s three huge benefits all wrapped into one. If you’re interested in advertising with Yahoo on mobile, then Gemini is an easy to use interface that can help you get there. It’s something to be aware of and try to help get your business coverage on search engines that aren’t Google.
Have you used Yahoo Gemini in the past? What do you think about Gemini in relation to Bing Ads?
Republished by permission. Original here.
Image: Yahoo!
The agreement between Bing and Yahoo (called the Search Alliance) is likely not going to be renewed. Gemini is Yahoo’s play to make sure they’re ready to take back the advertising when that occurs. The mobile focus is a great place to start and I think it has a lot of potential.
Mark S.
Yahoo gemini is AWFUL. Well, at least it’s REALLY inconsistent, and I’d strongly caution away from relying on it. Why? The lack of desktop or mobile targeting. If you’re selling an app, people will see it on their desktop. If you’re selling something you install on a computer, people see it on their phones. Is this a joke? How could they not know better?
Meteor B.
Yahoo Gemini is worthless. It seems like its target audience are people who doesn’t buy anything. Some of its partner sites seems to be bots designed to send traffic to simply generate clicks. People should stay way from Yahoo Gemini ads service like they would stay away from a plague.
Yahoo Gemini is complete garbage. Stay away!! Native search, you mean display? WTF, why rename it. And good luck trying to get a yahoo search/gemini rep on the phone. Complete waste of time. Yahoo, you should be embarrassed launching the POS platform..
Andrew
Set-up is not easy with Gemini. Compare this to Bing where you can get a set-up appointment and they’ll walk you through the basics. Also, Bing and Google have live chat support. I couldn’t even enter billing information in Gemini without getting an error message – must not like Safari.