As we initiated the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance, we had one very clear commitment to our respective customers: offer each of them a quality transition towards the newly formed combined market place. As we enter 2012 and loom towards the implementation of new European markets as early as the first semester, we wanted to let you know the latest news about and what you can expect in the UK and France over the coming weeks.

Paid search testing to start mid-January

As announced earlier, our goal is to have Microsoft Advertising adCenter provide the paid search results for Yahoo! sites in the UK, France and Ireland in the first semester of 2012. We will therefore begin as early as mid-January to test the delivery of paid search results from adCenter on a small percentage of Yahoo! traffic in these countries. While the actual volume may vary during the testing period, we plan to test adCenter ads on up to 10% of Yahoo! traffic. We will also continue to monitor and adjust the ad test until the Yahoo! ad serving transition to Microsoft Advertising adCenter is fully complete. As a routine best practice, we therefore recommend that you closely monitor your campaigns and be prepared to increase your campaign budget if it is more than 80 per cent depleted; your usual Microsoft representative can work together to adjust your budget if needed to help meet your business objectives.

Simplified location targeting coming soon

In partnering together, Microsoft and Yahoo! provide advertisers a choice in search. Our alliance will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation online by combining each company’s complementary strengths, while creating a single search platform to deliver scale and efficiencies in search advertising. As such, in addition to preparing to implement the combined marketplace, we are also already improving the adCenter campaign management experience. Simplified location targeting capabilities will help you reach more relevant users with new Language and Location targeting options, which will automatically replace the option to target by Language and market:

• Reach users in multiple locations that speak the same language.
• Select locations you wish to target at the campaign or ad group level from bundled countries to the individual city level.
• Apply bid boosting by locations to focus your spending more effectively.

All Microsoft Advertising adCenter customers in the UK and France will soon benefit from these new simplified targeting capabilities, automatically. This is one of the many new features that we will release to help you seize the full potential of the Bing and Yahoo! Search audience.

Ultimately, Yahoo! Search and Bing will deliver a competitive search offering that provides advertisers both quality audiences and opportunities to leverage strategic partnerships to efficiently deliver a strong return on investment. And today we are laying the European foundation for the materialization of this ambition. So stay posted as we will regularly update you on the next stages of the implementation in this blog.