Yesterday I attended a great customer forum in NYC where Y! and Microsoft Search executives talked about the state of the union. And, like any good State of the Union speech overall things are going well. But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at some stats. To date there have been:

  • 60k+ search accounts moved
  • 26k+ billing options
  • 11k+ optimization/creative tasks completed
  • 7,650+ hours of training
  • The marketplace stabilized over the first 90 days

If you think of the alliance as a marriage it’s off to a good start. But again don’t take our word for it take a third party expert’s like Nirah Shah, PHD and GM of Professional Edition Marin Software who was on hand to talk about the facts of the matter.

Nirah talked at length about how Marin Software sampled data from the Marin Global Search Index, an aggregated set of over 800 North American advertisers, who collectively spend more than $1.8bln annually on paid search. The data showed that from August 2010 to December 2010 Search Market Query Share for Bing rose 7.25%. During this same period Google gained .61%. Impressions for adCenter advertisers was up 4%, clicks up 2%, and costs roughly flat. CPC was consistently below Google. Remember that these results are in aggregate and your mileage may vary but in case it is we have some tips on that too from the Y! and Microsoft folks here.

Challenge: Due to ad serving differences, advertisers can experience higher performing traffic but lower volume

Insight: Strong focus on user relevance causes some ads to be filtered from the auction due to:

  • Landing page relevance
  • Minimum bid
  • Low CTR

Opportunity to gather incremental volume through aggressive KW Expansion & matching controls

  • adCenter Broad match does not deliver same coverage as Google
  • Exact match pricing vs broad match with same copy and bid
  • Remove negative exact matches inherited from Google. AdCenter interprets them differently and can cause a significant drop in volume
  • Bid on more KWs (use Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool for this)
  • Use Google SQ reports to identify strong broad match queries

Challenge: Advertisers with budgets being met during the day are likely seeing lower ROI

For this insight we captured the slide from the presenters Danielle Mohen-McMeekin, Director at Y! and Sean Donahoe, Director at MS.

There is some great info in there about using date parting to your advantage to see a difference in your ROI.

Stay tuned to the blog this week as we bring you more great tips and tricks from SES New York!

Thanks,

Phil Greenwood

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