Yahoo! Ad Serving is Shifting to Microsoft Advertising adCenter Now... Are You Ready?

For Yahoo! Search marketing advertisers, the switch to the adCenter platform is almost here. If you still have not yet moved your Yahoo! Search Marketing account over to adCenter, you should do so immediately to avoid losing traffic. 

To help ensure that you’re prepared to make a smooth transition, please review the information below and complete any steps you’ve yet to take by October 25^th:

Make sure your adCenter account is ready to go

• We’ve now moved more than 30% of Yahoo! Search traffic to adCenter and we anticipate increasing this to 50-60% by the end of this week. Please be sure you have an active adCenter account in place now, so you don’t miss out on this valuable pre-holiday season traffic.
• By October 25, make sure that your adCenter account is funded with the full budget amount you’ll need to cover all of your potential traffic from both Yahoo! Search and Bing.
• If you’re uncertain about how much to budget, review your overall search engine marketing spend across all search engines and consider allocating one-third of the total to adCenter, as Yahoo! and Microsoft sites combined receive 33.8%* of all search queries in the U.S. (Source: comScore Core Search (custom) August 2010)
• Monitor your bids on adCenter frequently, because the continuing transition of Yahoo! advertisers could cause some initial pricing variability. While keeping your return-on-investment (ROI) in mind, be prepared to adjust your bids or set incremental bids if increased competition impacts your ads’ positions.
• Be sure to take advantage of our recently-enhanced search network distribution and website exclusion features to help you manage your ROI on partner network traffic.

If you need help, you have several options

• Once you’re using adCenter exclusively, you’ll find helpful blog posts and discussion forums that are full of tips and advice here on the Microsoft Advertising Community site.
• You can also access free tutorials from Microsoft adExcellence.
• Explore the wealth of information and download time saving tools in the Microsoft Advertising Learning Center.
• For those of you on Twitter, follow @adCenter and tweet any questions you might have to us.
• In those instances where you just want to talk to a person on the phone or send an email, self-service advertisers (those without a Yahoo! account manager) can contact our support staff Monday through Saturday.

We’d like to make this transition period as seamless as possible for you, so please don’t hesitate to let us know what we can do to help. 

In closing, I just want to mention that if you have any ideas for new features or feedback that you’d like to pass along to the adCenter Development team, please leave a post in our ongoing adCenter Feedback thread in the advertiser forums.

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