Yahoo

Skopos built and managed the original Yahoo! research panel, starting with 10,000 members and scaling it to over 40,000+ members across the UK, Germany, and Spain over subsequent years.

The panel became a central insight engine, with two core functions:

1. Campaign evaluation (primary function):
   • Delivered post-campaign feedback for advertisers running media across Yahoo!.
   • Insights covered awareness, recall, cut-through, and brand lift.
   • Campaign feedback was packaged as part of the Yahoo! ad sales proposition, demonstrating ROI to advertisers and strengthening relationships.
2. Ad-hoc and deep-dive studies:
   • Explored vertical-specific topics (e.g. finance, sport, entertainment) to better understand how users engaged with Yahoo!’s site content.
   • Assessed UX design and site navigation, providing evidence for optimisation.
   • Deployed advanced techniques including eye-tracking, helping map user attention to page design, ad placement, and content consumption patterns.

The programme became a strategic asset for Yahoo!, driving both audience understanding and commercial advantage:

• Provided a benchmarking framework for campaign effectiveness, helping Yahoo! prove and strengthen its value proposition to advertisers.
• Enhanced audience profiling, giving editorial and product teams clarity on user behaviours, preferences, and needs.
• Supported UX optimisation, ensuring site design aligned with how users naturally navigated and consumed content.
• Allowed Yahoo! to tailor ad executions and site content more precisely to audience expectations.
• Strengthened the ad sales story, with research findings directly embedded in media packages to reassure advertisers on ROI.

Ultimately, this long-running programme enabled Yahoo! to balance user experience with advertiser needs, ensuring the platform remained both commercially competitive and audience-led during a critical period of digital media growth.