Yahoo Product Ads appear alongside search results and as display ads on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

Yahoo Inc. is giving retailers another way to target shoppers with ads in time for the holiday shopping season’s traditional Thanksgiving week kickoff.

The new ads, called Yahoo Product Ads, can appear in search results served by Polyvore, as well as those served by Gemini, the ad-buying platform Yahoo introduced in February 2014. Gemini is a self-service ad-buying marketplace that is Yahoo’s attempt to persuade marketers to use Yahoo data to buy native and video ads on Yahoo-owned sites such as Tumblr and other websites and apps. The ads also can be served as display ads by Yahoo-owned BrightRoll and may appear to shoppers on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

The ads use data gathered from retailers’ product feeds to display products based on what a consumer searched or is looking at.

Yahoo Product Ads aim to help retailers target consumers throughout the shopping process, says Courtney McKlveen, Yahoo’s vice president, industry lead retail and travel.

Kohl’s Corp., No. 22 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide, Wayfair LLC (No. 33), and Overstock.com Inc. (No. 31), are among the retailers that have tested the ad format. Marketing vendors CommerceHub, Merkle RKG and ChannelAdvisor Corp. also were involved in the testing phase.

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Early results were promising, according to a Yahoo blog post announcing the ads. For example, one ChannelAdvisor retail client generated a 14-to-1 return on ad spend, says Andrew Belsky, ChannelAdvisor’s director of U.S. digital marketing services. “The retailer is greatly benefiting from the additional revenue these ad campaigns are providing,” he says. 

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