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Partnership lets PCMag target its users on Yahoo! pages

The PCMag Digital Network, the online publishing arm of Ziff Davis Media, has always delivered active tech shoppers to its advertisers through its technology reviews. However, when demand began to outpace supply, it took a partnership with Yahoo! to deliver more impressions to help advertisers reach those buyers when they weren’t reading reviews.

The Problem:
PCMag Digital Network wanted to offer its advertisers more traffic on its most coveted reviews pages, such as those in its printer and laptop sections. Although PCMag Digital Network reviews over 2000 products a year, demand for advertising on reviews pages outstripped supply. PCMag Digital Network needed a way to offer its advertisers higher volumes of its most targeted tech buyers.

The Solution:
The company formed a partnership with Yahoo! that lets its advertisers reach users on Yahoo! pages, exponentially expanding PCMag.com’s available advertising space.

The Yahoo! partnership brought huge benefits to PCMag Digital Network and its advertisers. PCMag Digital Network was able to expand its targeted inventory to the Yahoo! site, reaching its most targeted readers in a new environment.

“This partnership with Yahoo! makes it easier for advertisers to reach more of our highly targeted, influential tech buyers,” says Jim Selden, VP of marketing for the PCMag Digital Network.

But it wasn’t just the extra pages that appealed to the PCMag Digital Network — it was the way it could retarget its readers on the Yahoo! site. Roughly 90 percent of PCMag.com visitors read its reviews, and more than 70 percent plan on buying technology products, services, or consumer electronics within the next 12 months. So there’s a huge benefit to serving an ad to a review reader even when that person isn’t on PCMag.com. Through the partnership, if someone reads a printer review on PCMag.com, PCMag Digital Network can “follow” that user onto the Yahoo! pages. An advertiser could serve a printer ad to that user hours, days or even weeks later, no matter what type of content the user was reading.

“Being able to retarget advertisers from specific sections is a huge benefit,” says Crystal Luginbuhl, director of client services at PCMag Digital Network. “An advertiser of printers is interested in an audience who is researching printers. Through Yahoo! retargeting, these tech-related ads can follow a user throughout the day on our network site and on to Yahoo! sites.”

The Results:
The Yahoo! partnership increases the amount of inventory PCMag Digital Network can offer its advertisers by more than 400 percent, which can help keep advertiser spending high even when the PCMag Digital Network’s own inventory is tight. Because the partnership still allows advertisers to target potential buyers, they can serve ads on Yahoo! without sacrificing performance. “Our consumer electronic categories yield comparable click-through results,” Luginbuhl says, “and combined with greater reach and scale and lower cost per impressions, that greatly benefits the advertiser.”