Introduction

Yahoo! Japan has announced Advanced URLs, which moves URL tracking from Destination URLs to structured URL components. This is very similar to the change Google made with Upgraded URLs. The benefits for Yahoo! Japan advertisers will be similar, as Upgraded URLs scale across large accounts and reduce or remove delays caused by editorial reviews.

The Basics Of Advanced URLs

Instead of a single Destination URL for each keyword or creative, Advanced URLs makes it so that each URL is now created from three URL 'building blocks' that exist in various parts of your account, similarly to how how Product Group URLs work today. These three building blocks are: 
 

• Final URL / Landing Page
• Tracking Templates
• Custom Parameters
   

Yahoo! Japan has announced a tentative migration deadline of mid October. Clients can proactivel migrate to Advanced URLs to leverage some of the benefits mentioned above, and create parity with Google accounts.

Advanced URLs In-Depth

The building blocks of Advanced URLs are found in several levels throughout your account. These building blocks come in three distinct flavors and are designed to be the same as Google’s use of Advanced URLs.
 

• Final URLs: A landing page / click-through URL.
• Tracking Templates: A template URL for tracking solutions and extra parameters.
• Custom Parameters: User-defined URL parameters.

Once adopted, URL building blocks are found throughout the account instead of just at the keyword or creative level. The combination of these three components will then generate and serve a URL just as is done for Google today.

Since the Tracking Template can live at the account level, you can manage common parameters and your redirect logic in one place. Additionally, because Tracking Templates don’t contain the Final URL, updates to the template won’t trigger editorial re-reviews (with the exception of creatives)..

Final URL / Landing Page

Every trackable object (keywords, creative,es and quicklinks) has what Yahoo! Japan calls a Final URL. In our platform, we call this the Landing Page. Yahoo! Japan also has a Mobile Final URL for mobile devices, known as a Mobile Landing Page in our platform.

The Final URL/Landing Page can be thought of as the ultimate page that a user clicking on the ad in Yahoo! Japan will arrive at. This URL must be a domain that the company owns and can only contain redirects if they are within the company’s own domain (no third-party redirects are allowed).

Tracking Template

A Tracking Template is the template that Yahoo! Japan Ads uses to assemble the URL that will actually be served with your ads. Its primary use, as the name implies, is to support third-party tracking solutions, such as Marin Tracker, which use URL redirects. It can also be used to add parameters in non-redirect cases for large numbers of objects.

You can add Tracking Templates to every object in your account, including: quicklinks, ads, keywords, groups, campaigns, and even the account itself. But the power of Advanced URLs comes from having fewer higher-level templates. In fact, the ideal scenario is to have just one at the account-level.

The Tracking Template can be set at the Account Level. Simply navigate to the Channels tab, select the Publisher Client Account, and then click Edit.  From the drop-down menu, select Account Tracking Template.

You can also add a Tracking Template at various other levels, including Campaign and Group, via bulk upload. Simply use the header Tracking Template in your bulk sheet.

Custom Parameters

Yahoo! Japan will also use Custom Parameters so that advertisers can pass information into Tracking Template or Landing Page dynamically.

Custom parameters live at all levels except for at the account level (i.e. keywords, creatives, ad groups, campaigns, etc.) You can refer to them in both the Tracking Template or the Final URLs/Landing Pages.

Up to three custom parameters can be defined per object, and they have both a custom name and custom value. The value of a custom parameter can contain any of the characters found in a normal URL, and even Yahoo! Japan-defined URL parameters (such as {device }) -- but cannot reference other custom parameters. Custom parameter values have a maximum length of 200 characters.

Putting It All Together

Let’s look at some examples and see what they might look like when set up using Advanced URLs. We’ll start with a non-redirect case.
 

Non-Redirect Case:

Account Level Tracking Template: {lpurl}&pdv={device}&{_mkwid}

Keyword Final URL/Landing Page: http://www.powpowsports.com/basketball_shoes

Keyword Custom Parameter: {_mkwid}=abc123

becomes:

http://www.powpowsports.com/basketball_shoes?pdv=%7bdevice%7d&mkwid=abc123
 

If we set up the Upgraded URL attributes as above, using an account-level template, it becomes clear how Yahoo! Japan Ads uses them to construct the URL at serving time by replacing {lpurl} with http://www.powpowsorts.com/basketball_shoes and by replacing {_mkwid} with mkwid=abc123
 

Redirect Case:

Account Level Tracking Template: http://tracker.marinsm.com/rd?cid=1t...ve}&lp={lpurl}

Keyword Final URL/Landing Page: http://www.powpowsorts.com/basketball_shoes

Keyword Custom Parameter: {_mkwid}=”mkwid=abc123”

When combined, the above attributes will become the following URL at serving:

http://tracker.marinsm.com/rd?cid=1t...sketball_shoes
 

In this redirect case, only the Tracking Template is different than in the non-redirect case covered earlier. Here, Yahoo! Japan Ads will again replace {_mkwid} with the keyword-level tracking ID. Additionally, Yahoo! Japan will recognize that {lpurl} is in the query string, so it will be automatically escaped.

It is worth noting that Yahoo! Japan Ads also permits you to put Custom Parameters directly into the Final URL/Landing Page. This is especially useful in the case of redirects, because any Custom Parameters that are found in the Final URL/Landing Page will be automatically encoded when the URL itself is encoded and placed in the Tracking Template.

If, for example, we had placed our Custom Parameter {_mkwid} into the keyword Final URL/Landing Page like this:

http://www.powpowsorts.com/basketbal...mkwid={_mkwid} 

and not in the Tracking Template, the combined URL would have looked like this:

http://www.powpowsports.com/basketba...%7Bcreative%7D

Notice how the custom parameter has been encoded along with the Final URL/Landing Page.

URL parameters

Besides {lpurl} (and variations of lpurl, such as {lpurl+1}, Yahoo! Japan will not be introducing any new tracking parameters for Advanced  URLs. You can find out more at this external link: https://help.marketing.yahoo.co.jp/en/?p=115
 

Platform Upgraded URLs Support

Notes

• If Advanced URL fields in the platform are out-of-sync with the publisher, the Preview URL may not show the same URL that will be shown by Yahoo! Japan.
• Since Yahoo! Japan (and Google) calculate the full, combined URL at the time of serving, the preview URL in the app for a keyword will not resolve ad-level tracking templates or custom parameters. The same is true for preview URL for for ads with keyword level components. Quicklinks can be attached to any number of campaigns and groups so the Quicklink-level preview URL will only ever resolve quicklink-level or account-level tracking templates.
• Destination URLs are no longer editable fields. Attempting to make changes to legacy Destination URL fields for Yahoo! Japan objects will have no effect.
• In Yahoo! Japan Ads, custom parameters that are not able to be matched will not be resolved. For example if a tracking template looks like this: {lpurl}&mkwid={_mkwid} and no custom parameter named {_mkwid} can be found in the currently served keyword or ad, their parent AdGroup, or its parent campaign, then Google Ads will simply replace {_mkwid} with a blank space when serving a URL. For a Marin preview URL, however, the custom parameter will not be substituted. Instead it will be left as-is to indicate that no match could be found.