Bidding on Bing, Yahoo! Search and Partner Sites in Microsoft Advertising adCenter

Since Microsoft Advertising adCenter now powers paid search and content ads on Bing, Yahoo! Search and partner sites in North America, you may have questions about your bidding options.

First of all, you should understand more about why you cannot bid on Yahoo! Search and Bing traffic separately. One of the goals of the search alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo! is to provide advertisers with the benefit of a combined marketplace through a single platform, creating a competitive alternative in search. So to maximize your opportunities to reach potential customers, you cannot bid separately on just Bing sites or just Yahoo! sites. Rather than managing campaigns on Bing and Yahoo! separately, you can reach the combined audience of both search engines by managing a single account, saving time and simplifying campaign management.

Reach: The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! sites (including Yahoo! Search, Bing and partners) in one marketplace allows you to reach 33.8 percent of the U.S. search market and 57 million unique searchers in the U.S. who don’t use Google[1], allowing advertisers to get their ads in front of a significant portion of the U.S. online audience.

Efficiency: Because adCenter is modeled after the industry-standard platform, you can utilize economies of scale when managing your campaigns, and use the time you save to further optimize your ads and campaign strategies.

Know Your Bidding Options

We recognize that not all clicks are created equal, and to help you with campaign ROI management, we may make adjustments to your click charges based on our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from sources within our network for the U.S. and Canada. Ultimately, this means you could receive discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic.

If you happen to notice specific sites in your Publisher Performance report that are not meeting your performance goals, you can use the website exclusion features to block your search and content ads from displaying on these sites. You can block up to 500 websites at the campaign and ad group levels using adCenter online or the adCenter Desktop^Beta tool. Please note that Bing and Yahoo! Search cannot be selected for exclusion.

And, if you want more control over your network distribution, you can set up separate ad groups with different search ad distribution settings and bidding strategies. The three distribution settings available today are: All Bing and Yahoo! search networks and syndicated search partners (this is the default setting), Only Bing and Yahoo! websites, and Only Bing and Yahoo! syndicated search partners.

Bidding and Budgeting Guidance

In order to keep your campaigns performing at the level you’re accustomed to, you will need to increase your adCenter budget in response to the increased volume now coming from Yahoo! Search traffic.  To learn more about optimizing your bidding and budgeting strategies for the Bing and Yahoo! Search marketplace, please review these previous posts:

Yahoo! Search and Bing: 5 Tips to Optimize Bids and Budgets

Feature Comparison Series: Budgeting, Bidding and Billing in Microsoft Advertising adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing

 Four PPC Tips to Get Your Campaigns Ready for the Bing and Yahoo! Search Transition

If you still have questions, feel free to leave a question in our forums.

[1] comScore Core Search (custom), August 2010

Sign in to adCenter | Need an account?  Sign up now

Share your thoughts in the forums | Follow us on Twitter | Become a fan on Facebook