If you deliver programmatic campaigns across the United States, in Europe, or somewhere else in the world, you must know about Yahoo DSP. If not, you now have one more reason to read this article.
Just in the US, 9 out of 10 Internet users visit a Yahoo site each month, such as Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, or AOL. The American Internet company keeps improving its advertising services, and Yahoo DSP keeps growing every year, with more and more amazing analytics tools and targeting features.
Yahoo in a few words
Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang; they initially called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. When the company became popular, they changed its name to Yahoo!.
Did you know that the Yahoo acronym stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”? Well, now you know.
Yahoo is based in Sunnyvale, California and is currently owned by Apollo Global Management since 2021.
Today, we’ll focus on Yahoo DSP, the omnichannel programmatic platform created by Yahoo.
Yahoo DSP for omnichannel campaigns
More than native ads
Yahoo DSP offers omnichannel solutions to advertisers who want to reach their audience anywhere and everywhere, from the moment they wake up to their bedtime. The advertising platform covers every channel: Native ads, Display, Connected TV, Digital Out-of-Home, Audio, Video, etc.
From DOOH campaigns to Spotify audio spots, you can reach your audience through their day-to-day life. Just for CTV, for example, Yahoo DSP is able to reach 108M households across Premium CTV providers such as Disney+ and Paramount.
As we said, you’ll find the most popular programmatic ad formats on Yahoo DSP. And you can even use different ad formats within the same campaign!
Blueprint: optimisation in real time
When running campaigns on Yahoo DSP, you can deliver more impressions, buy them for a cheaper price, and deliver your ads on the best websites or apps for each ad format. All this thanks to a super AI-powered feature: Yahoo Blueprint, launched one year ago.
Yahoo Blueprint optimises your campaigns for you in real time, which significantly shortens the exploration phase and lowers CPM and CPC. This valuable optimisation feature helped brands win up to 56% more impressions for their display campaigns! Blueprint proved to work better with Native, Display and Video campaigns.
Note that you can enable Yahoo Blueprint Performance at campaign level anytime during a campaign, but it can’t be disabled once live. It’s an amazing tool that will help you with automatic budget allocation through the entire life cycle of your campaigns.
Track conversions across devices and channels
Thanks to unique tracking and identity solutions, advertisers can reach specific audiences and track and measure their actions (conversion, sign up, lead, click, etc.) while staying compliant with data regulation laws across devices.
These solutions include Yahoo ConnectID, S2S and API connections, Next-Gen Solutions and CAPI. CAPI is one of the latest updates from Yahoo; more of that later.
Custom audiences, Yahoo data, valuable tools
Yahoo data and audience targeting
With 625M Yahoo user profiles and 200+ partners, the Yahoo data is one of the best on the market. Most of its data comes from its websites, widgets and apps (O&O data): Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Weather, AOL, etc.
You can, for instance, use contextual targeting for CTV campaigns or DOOH ads.
From standard audiences, covering more than 450 segments, to predictive audiences or purchase receipts, there is an audience for you on Yahoo DSP. And if there isn’t, you can create your own!
Create your own audiences
You can create your own audience segments on Yahoo DSP by uploading your first-party data and/or using Yahoo partners’. For example, you may upload a list of encrypted emails or phone numbers to the platform: the system will then match your data with the Yahoo data, or you could create predictive audiences from it. All this while respecting users’ consent.
We particularly love the DOOH screen list and indexation feature, which allows you to select specific screen IDs and learn insights about the people seeing these screens: where they go, what they like, etc. From the information you learn from these insights, you can create better targeting audiences, customised to your needs.
POI audiences (Point of Interest) are also handy: you can target people visiting specific shops, restaurants, buildings, etc. On Yahoo DSP, you can also upload a list of zip codes and target devices located nearby.
Know that when you create an audience on Yahoo DSP, you can reuse it on Taboola; the other way is not possible. You just need to activate the feature in your Yahoo seat.
Audience insights available for free
One of the most useful tools available on Yahoo DSP is Audience Insights… and it’s free!
With Audience Insights you can learn a lot of information about all the audiences available on the platform: reach, demographics, subscriptions, purchases, interests, etc. All this while applying as many filters as you want, and you can also compare different audiences. It’s really useful to learn more insights about your own audience and your converters.
For example, if we want to know which booking providers are used by the people living in the UK, and travelling from/to London, we can use Audience Insights. In this example, we compared men (baseline) and women data.
In early 2025, you’ll also be able to see IAB Data Transparency Labels on Yahoo DSP. More on that here.
No hidden fees
With Yahoo DSP, there are no extra fees to use Audience Insights; and no ad serving fees either! Yes, you read it right: no ad serving fees on Yahoo DSP. This DSP is one of the rare DSPs offering ad serving for free; one more reason to use it!
Also, there are no hidden fees: everything is displayed on the DSP. If you’re wondering how much it will cost you to use a specific audience for a specific ad format, just check the pricing next to the audience.
Access premium inventory
Yahoo Backstage
Yahoo Backstage gives you access to premium publishers such as Paramount, Disney (Hulu, Disney+), Spotify, DAZN, Roku, LG and Fox. This direct access allows you to get better deals because no third parties are involved. If you run CTV campaigns, we highly recommend that you get a seat on Yahoo DSP as soon as possible to deliver your ads on the best CTV devices (for a lower price on average).
Private and public deals
Public and private deals are also available on Yahoo DSP and allow you to run on MFA-free websites. Several publishers offer these deals: Yahoo, of course, through Yahoo Backstage; Magnite DV+, TripleLift, OpenX, etc.
You can learn more about these deals directly on the platform: win rate, top domains, top apps, top languages, ad sizes, devices, etc.
The integration of private deals on Yahoo DSP is quite straightforward. But deals are not the only great features available on the platform when it comes to targeting!
Yahoo O&O inventory
For a long time, advertisers complained that they could not target Yahoo O&O inventory only. Yahoo DSP listened and now you can! You can even select Yahoo sites one by one and exclude the ones you don’t like.
This is one of the major features of Yahoo DSP that make advertisers happy and willing to spend their ad budget on the DSP.
Yahoo DSP latest features
Support Hub and Blueprint IQ
AI is everywhere, even on Yahoo DSP, and we love it! The Blueprint IQ feature helps account managers, programmatic analysts and advertisers find the answers to their questions. Enter your question: Blueprint IQ gives you the answer you’re searching for. That’s so easy and useful!
IAB data transparency labels
On January 28, Yahoo announced that Yahoo DSP will be the first DSP to adopt IAB Data Transparency Labels. The IAS labels will be integrated within the platform interface in 2025 and they will provide more transparency about collected data.
Yahoo Conversion API
On April 28, Yahoo DSP announced the launch of CAPI which stands for Yahoo Conversion API. This brand new feature allows advertisers to share online and offline conversions in real time. If you run Drive-to-Store campaigns, you may want to learn more about Yahoo CAPI and start using it to understand the connections between conversions and campaign exposure.
Combined with Yahoo Blueprint, you can expect high-value optimisations for your programmatic campaigns. Yahoo mentioned “a 30–50% increase in attributed conversions for Commerce Media with Yahoo CAPI”.
Key information about Yahoo Conversion API: easy integration, data control, privacy-safe, better attribution, optimisation at product level possible on the DSP.
Double KPI optimisation
Multi-KPI optimisation allows advertisers to optimise their campaigns with two KPIs: the system then takes into account both KPIs. You can attribute a percentage of importance to each KPI.
For example, if CPC is your main KPI, set it at 80%. Then set CPA at 20% as your second KPI.
Note that only a few advertisers have access to this feature; Yahoo DSP is still running tests at the moment.
Only available with Ted Jordan
Ted Jordan has access to all the Yahoo DSP features mentioned previously, Double KPI optimisation included. But that’s not all!
Our programmatic agency can create custom deals for you, and even set up a profit margin for your DSP seat. If you’re interested in running ads through Yahoo DSP, contact us now: Ted Jordan is the only Yahoo DSP access provider for these two countries.
[More info about this partnership soon.]
Conclusion
Now that you have discovered all the Yahoo DSP features and some of the latest updates about the programmatic platform, it’s time to try it!
Premium inventory, no ad serving fees, free audience insights, omnichannel strategies, real-time multi-KPI optimisation with Yahoo Blueprint, custom audiences, smart support hub, O&O inventory selection and exclusion, profit margin… What are you waiting for?
Contact Ted Jordan, our programmatic analyst and media trader, for exclusive opportunities with Yahoo DSP.
