In the final part of our series on getting started in online advertising, we look at analytics and optimization.  See part one, “Getting Started in Display,” part two, “Display Ads Go Viral.” And part three, “How to Buy Your First Display Ad.”

When a new display ad goes live on the Internet, it may seem like the end of a process that started with strategy, creative and buying. But in many ways when an ad goes live it’s just the beginning: analytic data comes and that starts the cycle all over again, as information is used to refine and optimize the marketing strategy, creative content, and buying plan.

What’s the data telling you?
For Adam Chandler, vice president of sales for PointRoll, a Web marketing firm specializing in rich media, all the steps of an online marketing campaign are interdependent. “There needs to be a continuous-feedback loop,” he says. “Online advertising allows you to get real-time information and then optimize your current spend based on what the data is telling you. Once you go live, it’s really just the beginning, because you’re now getting feedback from consumers on what they think of your brand.”

Analytic data includes length of time spent interacting with an ad, click-through rates, user demographic information, and whether users filled out a form or forwarded something to a friend.

Display ads get  smart
Increasingly, however, ads are able to optimize themselves. One of the latest innovations in online display advertising is dynamic ads. Yahoo!’s version is known as Smart Ads and uses demographic and clickstream data to target consumers with relevant ads. Pointroll has developed a product called adcontrol. (PointRoll is an official Yahoo! Smart Ads partner.)

Whereas previously marketers would create multiple versions of an ad and then test them extensively for response rates, dynamic ads optimize text, images, colors and other content in real time based on what combinations are getting the most attention from any given target audience.

Last year PointRoll used dynamic ads in a large campaign launched by the Ford Motor Company. To combat the sluggish auto sales that gripped the auto industry during the recession, Ford launched the Ford Advantage campaign. Its dynamic ads targeted consumers at the local level, with logos and links to their local dealers, and continually optimized to find the right colors, cars, ad copy and financial offer.

“By enabling multiple creative combinations via this one buy,” Chandler says, “Ford maximized its dollar value, and through this process were able to optimize based on what was working and what wasn’t, for the best engagement and return on investment. We were able to report some really high interaction and direct-response metrics.”

To learn more about Yahoo! Smart Ads and the innovative technology behind them, check out this video:

 And be sure to visit that Yahoo! Analytics blog.

— Christian Chensvold

Christian Chensvold is a New York-based writer covering business, lifestyle and culture. Visit his blog, Ivy-Style.com.

Social and search, together at last
The world is indeed getting smaller and smaller. The worlds of social media advertising and search advertising are merging, and fast. Luckily, there are tools you can use to measure your performance in both worlds at once, says Laurie Sullivan on MediaPost’s SearchBlog.

Is social media corporate blogging’s death knell?
True, we’ve had a few positive things to say about corporate blogging now and then. We’re doing it right now, after all. But we may be dinosaurs before we know it. Simon Mainwaring, who, not incidentally, has been featured on our blog recently, says on his blog that they are going out of style and offers eight teasers on how “the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the Web.” Dude, this is all so self-reflexive.

Millenials grow up on social media
Millenials. Gen-Y. Generation Next. “The kids these days.” Call ‘em what you will. Fact is, the young folk born in the 1980s and ‘90s are leading the charge in social media and, moreover, are unlikely to get sick of Facebook and Twitter—and whatever it is that will come two years down the pike to replace ’em—well into middle age, according to a recent Pew study. Agencies take note.

Yahoo! Tower of Babel
Ever wonder how Yahoo!—with many sites in many languages around the globe—gets to know its users? Yahoo! Web Analytics, which recently celebrated its second birthday, has the answers—answers that smart advertisers can benefit from.

Wise guy
Speaking of analytics, in his new role as CEO of MediaBank, former Yahoo! GM, Bill Wise, opines on AdExchanger.com on how technology and analytics can help manage your media efforts. We love our analytics here at Yahoo!, as Bill well knows. Kudos to our old friend, Bill, and best of luck with the new venture. We’re sure to be working together in the future.

Is your agency in a media tizzy?
Writing in Adotas, film director, Ernie Mosteller talks about the frenzy in the market today, what with all the different kinds of media customers have to choose from. “Media and creative are now a maze of micro-strategies and mini-tactics that each work differently for different types of people, depending, of course, on time of day and whether the sun is shining,” he writes. “The fact is, there are just too many different types of media out there to focus a crystal ball on what will work for a given brand, and how.” The key to success? Good content—which is still king.

— Michael Mattis

(Marble image by seeks2dream via Flickr, CC 2.0)

There are some things we never get tired of talking about. Take online ratings, for instance. Once again the numbers show Yahoo! sites at the number one spot in seven different categories.

We know we said the same thing last month, and many times before that, and it’s still true. If you want to check out the top-ranked sites in their respective fields, you simply have to join everyone else on Yahoo! Sports, News, Shopping, Finance, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Local and omg!

Green goes up
Special congratulations this month go to Yahoo! Green, which grew more than 300 % and jumped from No. 5 rank in February to the No. 1 Green site in the U.S. in March. It’s no wonder, since everyone trying to live a more responsible lifestyle appreciates its engaging blend of news, commentary and practical information.

Overall, the online population continues to grow, showing an 11.6 % increase over this time last year. Yahoo! sites reach 73.7% of these Americans. In fact, Yahoo! sites are responsible for over 10% of total time spent online in the U.S. Advertising reflects this, too. Impressions/page views for Yahoo! Network were up 3% in comScore’s Ad Network report, while our competitors declined or remained flat.

We also turned up some interesting factoids from comScore World Metrix, the data from which all of these numbers are drawn. Outside of North America, for instance, Yahoo! has the largest audience for Sports in Europe, Homepage in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, and Finance in Europe and Middle East/Africa.

— Chris Marlowe

You may already know that Yahoo!’s Ad Delivery Report is a great way for you to track and impr0ve the effectiveness of your search campaigns. But did you know that the data can also be used to help your display campaigns perform better?

“I’ve used the Yahoo! Ad Delivery Report and enhanced reporting to leverage our search marketing insights to target display ad strategy and deliver greater results,” says Yahoo!’s Gabriel Elliott, an account executive who has helped many advertisers take advantage of these tools.

The Ad Delivery Report, helps advertisers fine-tune their campaigns by helping identify under-performing sites, block out any irrelevant publishers, and focus on the best performing sites.

Quelle surprise!
he Ad Delivery Report, combined with our enhanced targeting features is increasingly being used by advertisers to improve their display campaigns, as well as their search marketing campaigns, says Elliott. For example, one client who was targeting men to promote a new online football game with his display campaign discovered, to its surprise, that more women were actually clicking on its search marketing ads than men, according to the enhanced demographic reporting.

“This is a great example of Yahoo!’s ability to leverage its science and technology, combined with scale, to find out who your audience is and craft a more effective, more targeted display campaign,” says Elliott.

Audience insight at scale
“Only Yahoo! offers this kind of insight at such a vast scale,” continues Elliott. “Six hundred million people use Yahoo! each month, many of them already registered and logged in, offering advertisers enormous insights and precision-targeted opportunities.”

For more info, visit Yahoo! Advertising, or contact your Yahoo! Advertising account executive—a real, live person is there to help.

By the way, Gabe Elliott also founded our LinkedIn group. Join Gabe and the rest of us in the conversation on LinkedIn. You can follow Gabe on Twitter.

— Michael Mattis

The Vancouver Winter Olympics proved to be a boon for advertisers on Yahoo! Sports, and showed the almost awe-inspiring power of the Yahoo! frontpage. Due in no small part to promotion on Yahoo.com, Yahoo! Sports ranked number one in online Olympic coverage, outranking even the website of the official Olympic TV network, NBC, with 40 million total unique visitors to the games. In fact, Yahoo! Sports enjoyed a 21.3 percent increase in page views during the month of February, much of it sent directly from the Yahoo! front page.

(And in case you haven’t heard, Yahoo! just entered into an agreement to acquire the fantasy sports site Citizen Sports, which itself just set a traffic record, generating more than 39 million unique monthly users in February, according to comScore.)

Sports wasn’t the only winner in February. Eight other Yahoo! sites showed positive growth: Answers, Games, Health, Education, Kids, Green, Dictionary and Lifestyle.

Taking second place to Yahoo! Sports was Yahoo! Lifestyle, with a 14.6 percent increase in unique visitors. Yahoo! Dictionary was no slouch either, boasting a 6.4 percent increase (that’s a whole lot of definitions.) Yahoo! Games was another one of the big winners, with a 4.6 percent last month over January—and the only major games site to show a month-over-month increase during February (the shortest month of the year, and one that usually shows declines). Yahoo! Answers, meanwhile, rose 3.6 percent and Yahoo! Health rose 2.1 percent.

How is the Internet faring overall? Pretty darn well. According to the stats, provided by our pals at comScore—from which all these stats have been gleaned—the total U.S. Internet population was up almost 10 percent, year over year.

— The Team

It’s a pretty common question among online advertisers: How do I use all the marketing metrics I’m inundated with? In an article posted yesterday on Ad Age, Scott Burke, our VP of engineering, user data and analytics, tackles that question with some pretty detailed answers, and talks about what’s important now—whether it’s clicks, time spent, the delta between search and display analytics, and much more. Click over to Ad Age for all the details.

—The Team

(Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr CC 2.0)

Time spent on Yahoo! front page up 20 percent since redesign
Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch reports from Yahoo! Analyst Day on the success of our new front page. Writes Schonfeld: “Senior vice president Tapan Bhat gave an overview of how the redesigned homepage is performing. In the past three months, pageviews are up 9 percent, and time spent on the homepage is up 20 percent… Some of the big drivers of user engagement come from the ability to customize the homepage by adding applications and feeds from anywhere on the Web into the My Favorites column on the left-hand side. According to Yahoo consumer surveys, 75 percent of users love the applications area and 40 percent are using between 6 to 11 apps. Usage of that feature is up 8 percent over the past three months.” Not bad, if you did say so ourselves.

“Yahoo! Hearts Creatives” video a hit
We do indeed speak your language, agency creatives. A few weeks ago we unleashed the Yahoo! Hearts Creatives video—originally created as an in-house marketing vehicle—on the general agency public. Since then, it’s gotten rave reviews and is appearing embedded on sites all over. Check out some of the comments, and feel free to leave one of your own. Meanwhile, a Leo Burnett exec asks, “is strategy the new creative?.”

Holiday sales success secrets
Sometimes, you don’t realize the truth of an obvious bit of advice until it’s put in front of you—you know, one of those “I should have thought of that” moments. Last week we posted five tips and tricks for making your holiday season successful in a tough economy based on Yahoo! research. Nothing groundbreaking here, just common sense you don’t realize is common until someone mentions it.

Tips for using Yahoo! Site Explorer
ClickZ’s Erik Dafforn, offers several tips on Yahoo! Site Explorer, a comprehensive set of tools that help you, for starters, explore all the Web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. You might want to put your propeller beanie on for this one. To explore Explorer, explore here.

Five ways to optimize your Facebook marketing
While everyone’s whining about the new Facebook look and feel, marketers should take a second to look at Daniel Flamberg’s post over at iMedia Connection. For marketers, says Flamberg, “Facebook isn’t a cakewalk.” He then offers five solid tips on how to make the best of it.

Improving your search performance
Thinking ahead to 2010, Search Engine Land’s Michelle Stern says that you, the B2B marketer, can improve your search results next year by following three relatively simple rules.

Project management 101
What creative hasn’t suffered under poor project management? BNET’s Lindsay Blakely takes on the topic and talks to some of the best project managers in the business to get their secrets. If you feel your project’s management is suffering, you might want to send your manager this as a little hint-hint.