YMax Contextually Curated Segments Drove Relevance While Delivering 91% Incremental Reach Over ID-Based Buy for Major Sports Retailer
The challenge
A leading sportswear brand ran a digital campaign using identity-based audience targeting, designed to reach adults aged 18–35, a broad demographic segment.
Despite a sizable investment and a large reach footprint, the campaign’s placements told a different story. Ads appeared alongside low-intent content: gaming forums, recipe blogs, gambling results, and even AI detection tools. While this method of targeting fits the bill of traditional programmatic ID-based targeting, finding “your audience” wherever they are and whatever they are reading, it’s clear those strategies have limits in their effectiveness.
For a brand focused on sport, performance, and lifestyle inspiration, the environments didn’t match the message and eroded creative impact.
THE SOLUTION
To test whether relevance could outperform, the brand utilized Yieldmo’s AI-powered contextual platform, YMax, to run a parallel campaign.
Instead of chasing IDs, YMax identified real, contextual moments of intent and surfaced pages where sports enthusiasts, fantasy league players, and fitness fans were already engaged with athletic stories, stats, and performance advice.
The same creative ran across both campaigns. The only difference: the context.
YMax’s semantic AI curated high-quality sports and lifestyle placements (e.g., CBSSports.com, FantasyPros.com, Women’s Health, Runner’s World, Basketball Reference) down to the individual URL level and replaced generic ID-based inventory targeting with relevant, brand-aligned pages that mirrored the campaign’s spirit of athletic motivation.
THE RESULTS
METRIC
YMax (Contextual)
ID-Based (Audience)
Lift
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
+33% higher
Baseline
+33%
Incremental Reach
+91% new users reached
–
+91%
The YMax campaign delivered 33% higher CTR against an already strong baseline of adhesion format performance. It also reached 91% incremental users vs. the ID-based campaign. Despite the relevance of the pages to the audience and the brand, due to the engrained challenges of ID-fragmentation in the programmatic ecosystem, only 9% of the traffic on the contextually targeted campaign was actually targetable using the ID-based 18-35 audience. Put another way, 91% of the relevant, performant traffic was incremental user reach!
But the biggest difference wasn’t in the numbers it was in where the brand showed up.
YMAX
ID-BASED
Example Placements
Example Placements
Contextually relevant, brand-safe, high-intent moments — people actively engaging with sports content and athlete culture.
Broad, low-relevance pages unrelated to athletic motivation or product use.
Let’s look at a few side-by-side. Where would you rather be if you were a sports apparel retailer?
SIDE BY SIDe
ID-Based Placement
BibleGateway.com
(Scripture reference site)
YMax Placement
CBSSports.com
(Game recaps, athlete stats, scores)
Reading Corinthians or Conference Championships?
Why It Resonates
A spiritually-minded reader might technically be “18–35,” but this environment has zero connection to athletic lifestyle or purchase intent. YMax instead captures sports fans in the moment they’re thinking about performance.
ID-Based Placement
ZeroGPT.com
(AI Detection Tool)
YMax Placement
FantasyPros.com
(Fantasy football rankings and draft tools)
Detecting AI or Drafting Your Lineup?
Why It Resonates
AI tools draw random curiosity traffic, not product affinity. FantasyPros, on the other hand, aligns perfectly with sneaker and apparel audiences who identify with athletic competition.
ID-Based Placement
Powerball.com
(Lottery site)
YMax Placement
ImmaculateGrid.com
(Sports trivia and player comparison game)
Dreaming of a Jackpot or Playing for the Win?
Why It Resonates
Both involve numbers — but one is luck, the other is love of the game. YMax reaches people already mentally in a sports performance mindset.
The YMax campaign connected the brand to real moments of attention, not just names on a list. The result was higher engagement, improved efficiency, and environments that reflected the brand’s premium positioning.
TAKEAWAY
Identity-based targeting reaches “people”.
YMax reaches moments that matter.
When advertisers ask, “Where would you rather be?” the answer is obvious:
On the pages that inspire action.