Third Party Vendors
Last modified on October 27, 2011Simplified 3rd Party Ad Serving Model
- request page, i. e. www.yahoo.com
- HTML reply incl. 3rd party ad code AKA ‘tag’
- request full ad code via IFRAME or JavaScript generated by the tag
- HTML reply with further JavaScript and references to media files; at this stage 3rd party cookies might be set
- request ad creative media
- ad creative reply containing images, flash, video etc.
Yahoo! accepts 3rd party hosted ads from a variety of certified vendors (see list on the left). For advertisers it’s easy to submit tags with content hosted on their own ad servers. Third party ad serving also enables advertisers to get consolidated reporting and creative optimization across publishers. All advertisers must agree to the Terms & Conditions.
As we take user experience very seriously at Yahoo! all vendors must be approved and meet quality standards in terms of availability, response time, and security of the ad server. We evaluate the server infrastructure of each company to be sure they are capable of delivering high volume of ads. If you would like to get a certification for an ad server that is not on the list please submit a request to .
Please note that Yahoo! does not allow 4th party serving of ads.
Yahoo! permits third party servers to set cookies but the data may not be associated to a user’s personally identifiable information. Read more about our privacy policy.
Tag submissions should be sent in a txt file as an attachment and not in the body of the email only as Iframe (exceptions for JavaScript are expanding and floating formats).
Please note: We accept one tracking beacon per ad (also called tracking pixel or 1×1 transparent gif). It should be delivered separately as an IMG tag. We don’t accept tracking beacons in SCRIPT tags unless the 3rd party vendor has a special approval for that. Embedding tracking beacons in the ad code is not allowed.
Requirements for 3rd party tags:
Web pages are composed of hundreds of objects (images, scripts, stylesheets). To speed up web pages, browsers will cache these assets to local disk. Caching rules are dedicated by HTTP headers (Cache-control, Expires, Last-Modified) and graphical ads are required headers to promote “cache busting”. As an added measure, we also implement a cache-busting random number in 3rd Party tags. In order to enable that raw 3rd Party tags need to have a placeholder for the cache buster (see [timestamp] in the sample tags below). Not adding a cache buster might result in counting discrepancies.
In order to enable click tracking the tags need to have a placeholder for click tracking (see [pub_url] in the sample tags below) that will receive a redirect URL dynamically that should ideally result in a 302 http response. It will be inserted dynamically when the ad is delivered before the 3rd party tracking and landing page in the http call.
The click tracking http sequence should look like this by default:
[Yahoo! click tracking redirect]*[3rd party tracking redirect]*[landing page]
Alternatively we can place a 1×1 transparent pixel after the click tracking redirect if required. The 3rd party vendor needs to notify us of such a need in advance.
Sample IFRAME tag format:
<iframe src="http://cname.com/rm/12345-6?ran=[timestamp]&clk=[pub_url]" width=300 height=250 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 hspace=0 space=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no frameborder=0> < a href="http://cname.com/clk/12345-6?ran=[timestamp]"><img src="http://cname.com/img/12345-6?ran=[timestamp]" alt="" border="0" width="300" height="250"></a> </iframe> |
Sample Javascript tag format (expanding and floating formats submissions only):
<SCRIPT src="http://cname.com/rm/12345-6?ran=[timestamp]&clk=[pub_url]"></script><noscript>< a href="http://cname.com/clk/12345-6?ran=[timestamp]"> |
