As we initiated the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance, we committed to offer each of our customers a quality transition towards the newly formed combined market place. For that reason, we are providing you on this blog with regular updates on the progress we make, and some guidance on how to prepare for the transition. For instance, when we initiated mid-January to test the delivery of paid search results from adCenter on a small percentage of Yahoo! traffic in France and the UK, we encouraged adCenter customers to closely monitor their campaigns and to be prepared to increase their budget if it was more than 80 per cent depleted.
Soon, we will start the next phase towards combining Bing and Yahoo! Search audiences, and wanted therefore to give you further guidance to advertisers who would currently run some search marketing campaign on Yahoo!.
Your Yahoo! Search Marketing account transition will be soon available.
As part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, Yahoo! Search Marketing users will need to transition their accounts to Microsoft Advertising adCenter in February. While there is no action required today, it’s important to know that we will provide support and an easy-to-use transition tool when we are closer to transition. This tool will be available as an extra Tab in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account starting from mid-February.
The full transition process itself is fairly simple and you will be guided through it:
- Setting up your account in adCenter, if you do not already have one;
- Ensuring that all your campaigns are ready in adCenter. By default, campaigns imported from Yahoo! Search Marketing will be paused until the ad serving transition happens. We will provide you more insights soon on how to make the most of adCenter unique capabilities and latest features, so that you can thrive in the combined auction;
- Ad serving transition is when the Yahoo! traffic will start to flow through adCenter. This final phase will be complete when 100% of the Yahoo! search traffic is exposed to adCenter ads. At that stage only, your Yahoo! Search Marketing account will become read-only and will stop serving any ad impressions.
By following the instructions in the specially compiled Transition Checklist, small businesses will ensure to transition their accounts with ease and with little impact to their search marketing campaigns. Larger advertisers, with complex account structure or extensive portfolios, will be soon contacted by Microsoft and Yahoo! representatives to explore together the best approach for their specific case.
Register for the upcoming free webinar on 22nd February
We will attend SES London later this month to answer questions you may have about the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. But we will also organise a one-hour webinar on February 22nd during which our experts will walk you through the overview of the Search Alliance, its benefits, the transition overview and the features comparison between the two platforms and their implications when setting up your campaign in adCenter. If you’d like to attend the webinar, please register here.
Towards a competitive search marketing alternative
Yahoo! Search and Bing will offer a competitive search offering that provides advertisers both quality audiences and opportunities to leverage strategic partnerships to efficiently deliver a strong return on investment. We expect to complete our transition in the UK, France and Ireland by end of April 2012. This means our advertisers will start benefiting from the new joint audiences by the second quarter of 2012. By then, you will be able to advertise on the full Yahoo! Search, Bing and their partner networks traffic through your adCenter campaigns. However, we are keen to bring you the benefits of our combined audiences sooner and may accelerate the transition in these markets if we can do so while still maintaining a quality experience.
As always, we will keep you informed of our progress. So stay tuned.