Account Transition – Smooth Landing for Search Alliance

In my previous articles, Yahoo & Microsoft Alliance and Optimizing for Bing, I mentioned about the plans of Microsoft and Yahoo to merge and its impact on natural search results and search engine optimization.

The other major impact of search alliance will be on pay per click (PPC) advertising on both Yahoo and Bing.  Microsoft adCenter will become the search advertising platform that will be used by both companies and will manage the search advertising marketplace, including the API platform for bid management and reporting tools for big search marketers and SEM agencies.

Yahoo and Bing Search Alliance

Account history (reporting and scoring) will not be carried over from the Yahoo Search Marketing platform to Microsoft adCenter during transition.  Nevertheless, Yahoo will continue to provide access to the last 13 months of Yahoo Search Marketing account reporting and history after the transition.

Advertisers starting new accounts on Microsoft adCenter will need to re-establish their keyword and account histories. Naturally, the marketplace will shift when the Yahoo traffic is added to Bing, so you need to monitor and optimize your account to ensure that everything works smoothly.

If you are already managing keywords on the adCenter platform, that account will retain its reporting and performance history.

As a result of each company continuing to own its own consumer search experience, there may be variances in the number of ads that are displayed in each location on the page.

Moving forward, your ad rank on Yahoo and Bing SERPs will be the same based on several factors including the amount you bid, your ad’s relevance, and your ad’s click-through rate.

Yahoo and Microsoft will enforce their jointly created editorial guidelines.  So, advertisers need to review the updated editorial guidelines to see if their ads and keywords are affected as some ads in your account may get disapproved during the transition to adCenter,.

After the search alliance, Yahoo and Microsoft will have a combined market share of 20% – 30% (depending on the market/vertical).  If you only run ads on only one of these engines, you should be expecting an increase in your traffic and ad spend.  If you currently running ads on both Yahoo and MSN, your overall traffic should theoretically stay the same though Yahoo and MSN believe it will increase.

Search Alliance Market Share

Depending on the market, the situation might be different.  However, in most cases, you should be expecting an increase in overall CPC as you will be facing with more competition.

Soon, you will be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo Search Marketing account, which will walk you through the step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account you may already have.

As a search engine marketing agency, we have been working with Yahoo and Microsoft account teams to plan the transition. The three main options are:

Search Alliance Transition Options

Filed Under: PPC Advertising