How To Setup Your First Yahoo Gemini Campaign

Yahoo-Gemini

In February 2014, Yahoo launched Gemini which is an online marketplace for businesses to display mobile and native ads. While Google is still dominating the organic search market,  Yahoo sits in second place with 8.79% market share:

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Source: Statcounter


As the 5th most visited site in the world, Yahoo is a brilliant platform for marketers and online businesses to drum up business. In this article, I will show you how to setup your first Yahoo Gemini campaign.

What is Yahoo Gemini?

Yahoo Gemini is an advertising network that serves ads on Yahoo and their partner sites. Gemini is not part of the Yahoo Bing Network and any adverts placed on Gemini will not be shown on any Bing or Microsoft partner websites.

Gemini allows you to create mobile and native adverts. If you’ve never heard the term ‘native ad’ before, the term refers to placing adverts within content to make it look like less an advert and more like natural content:

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Gemini is still fairly new and doesn’t offer all the in-depth features you get with Google AdWords, but does receive a huge amount of daily traffic which you’d be crazy not to jump on.

Getting Started With Yahoo Gemini

If you don’t have an account already, you can sign up for free here. (When Setting Up, Use Promo Code “YAHOOADS” and get $50 Ad Spend Credit!)  After signing up you will be presented with the following options:

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You can drive traffic to your website, create an advert to raise brand awareness or increase mobile app installs. In this example, I will create a campaign to drive visitors to my website.

Targeting Your Audience on Gemini

Yahoo Gemini offers basic location targeting options, but sadly doesn’t let you define your audience by zip code. You have the option to select location by country and city while being able to filter out places you don’t wish to serve ads to:

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You can also filter by language (although all ads must be in English) and gender.

To further hone in on your audience, Yahoo Gemini lists a number of interests you can pick to focus your reach:

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Gemini recommends that you set your campaign to reach mobile and native devices and is the default set. If you wish to create only mobile or native ads, you will need to click the Modify hyperlink and select your campaign type:

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Bidding and scheduling

Gemini ads can be scheduled to run for a specific amount of time or continuously until your budget has been reached:

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You’re given the option to select the CPC for native and mobile search ads individually or use the same rate for both. Unlike Facebook and Google who offer a suggested bid based on the audience you’re targeting, Yahoo Gemini doesn’t suggest anything. Finding a starting point can be a little more difficult and a close eye needs to be kept on ads at the beginning to find the best CPC bid.

The minimum CPC bid must  be $0.05 or higher.

Creating Your Yahoo Gemini Advert

When creating your advert, you have the option between using a large rectangle (1200x627px) or a square (627x627px). Yahoo Gemini suggests you use both to gain maximum reach, but you should really test both and see which ad size prospects respond to best.

If your image doesn’t fit their dimensions, Gemini is usually nice enough to will tell you what the problem is:

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As I’ve mentioned before, if you don’t have a designer then Canva is a great website to create custom designs that fit Gemini’s ad images.  

After kitting out your advert with an image, next up is the copy. You will be asked to fill in the following:

  • Ad title – 50 characters
  • Ad description – 150 characters
  • Company name – 35 characters
  • Display URL – 35 characters
  • Destination URL – 2048 characters

Once complete your Gemini ad should look something like this:

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Before your ad goes live Gemini will preview your ad on mobile, smartphone and desktop devices as I’ve highlighted in red above.

Now you’re ready to launch your advert…or you can leverage keywords to ensure a much sharper targeting process. I strongly recommend this to get the most out of your campaigns, as Gemini’s basic targeting options are not that great.

Gemini Keyword Match Types

Yahoo Gemini is a little bit old school when it comes to selecting keywords for your ad campaigns. You have the option to target the following keyword types:

  • Board
  • Exact
  • Phrase
  • Negative

Their user interface to add keywords to your ad campaign is not the easiest to use and requires the use of special symbols:

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The example below shows keywords in ascending order for broad, exact, phrase and negative match types:

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Place each keyword on a new line and use the appropriate symbols for the match type you want.

Payment details

All that’s left now is to enter your billing details and you’re good to go. Yahoo Gemini requires you to fund your account with a minimum of $25 and by default enables auto-reload. The minimum daily budget per ad campaign is set to $4.

Summary

Getting started with Yahoo Gemini is really easy. While only a year old, it doesn’t have all the features you see on Google AdWords or the Facebook Adverts Manager, but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked. At the time of writing this article, you cannot retarget or create any type of custom audiences to show your adverts.

Before you create your first campaign on Gemini, be sure to take a quick look at their policies to ensure you’re not breaking the rules.

Ready To Start Your Own Yahoo Gemini Account? Earn $50 in ads credit when you use click the banner below and enter in the words “YAHOOADS”.

Yahoo-Gemini

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Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

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Summary
How To Setup Your First Yahoo Gemini Campaign
Article Name
How To Setup Your First Yahoo Gemini Campaign
Description
This article will detail step by step instructions on how you can quickly, easily, and effectively set up your first Yahoo Gemini advertising campaign.
Author
About The Author

Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

2 Comments

  • Jon

    November 13, 2015

    Hello Tom! Created an account -> created -> added card! From the card written off is$ 1, the transaction has appeared the status of “added Funds”, but after 5 minutes the same transakcija changed the status to “Refund transaction”. What could be the reason? What can you do? Shows stopped!

    • Tom Bukacek

      November 14, 2015

      Jon- I’d reach out directly to customer support on Twitter for an answer