What You Need to Know about the Yahoo! & Microsoft Bing Merger
As everyone in the SEO & PPC community knows, Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing will soon be joining forces to combine their search engine capabilities to hopefully gain some ground from the almighty Google. Yahoo! was nice enough to even set up a Yahoo! Transition Center to help guide everyone though the process, and make things as smooth as possible. It includes useful links and videos to help the average do-it-yourself PPCer minimize mistakes.
When will the merger be completed?
As of May, 2010, Yahoo! & Bing accounted for 28-30% of all searches done online. Google still has a stranglehold on search engine world, at just over 74% of searches. The Yahoo! & Bing search alliance hopes to help the merger compete with Google, although we may not know the results immediately. The merger is scheduled to begin in August, 2010, but the final date of complete data and advertising transfer is still unknown, as much will depend upon the busy holiday season of online shopping. The Yahoo!/Bing Merger may be completed in November or December, or we may have to wait until January for the final product. I guess we’ll all be waiting together.
How will things change on the SERPs?
Visually, the average Yahoo! searcher will not see much difference. The SERPs will still maintain all Yahoo! branding, including logos, features, colors, logins, etc. However, Microsoft Bing will provide all SEO & PPC results, and up to 30% of all searches will be identical to Bing searches today. This means that if you are currently ranking well in Yahoo! searches but not Bing searches, you may want to start some Bing search engine optimization. Soon.
What does this all mean for the SEO or PPC Advertiser?
Because of the many changes being implemented with the search alliance, many PPC professionals may have to first take a step back before they can take a step forward.
Some of the major changes for online advertisers include:
• Bing engines will now show all PPC & SEO results, meaning you may need to reevaluate your keywords and website optimization for Bing instead of Yahoo!
• There will now only be 1 reporting system adCenter, instead of one for Yahoo! and one for Bing.
• Advertisers will now have the ability to target search results to specific demographics, such as region, gender, and age.
• PPC Advertisers will be able to block domains on the Yahoo!/Bing Content Network.
• Keyword match types will be changed from “standard” and “advanced” to exact, broad, and phrase matched.
• Allowing thousands of additional negative keywords in every campaign and ad group than are currently allowed in Yahoo!
• Advertisement titles reduced from 40 characters to 25. Body descriptions are remaining unchanged at 70 characters. Very important to note: any ads with 40 character titles during the switch will be changed to inactive, and therefore will not show in search results.
• The adCenter will now allow for better daily and monthly budgeting options for increased budget management.
• Will not be implemented during the initial release, but will eventually allow for Rich Media Display Ads on the Content Network.
• Around October, PPC changes will take place, and all PPC advertisers will need to reevaluate their budgets, ads, keywords… pretty much everything.
When are all the changes happening?
According to Yahoo! the initial transition processes will begin in August 2010. Between August and September, search engine result pages will begin to show Bing results in the organic listings. During this time frame, Yahoo! is asking all current advertisers to log into their accounts and initiate the transition from within the account. This is more of a demand than suggestion, as advertisers will not have a choice to refuse to go along with the merger.
Starting in October 2010, PPC changes will begin. During this time frame, all final changes will be implemented, with the PPC changes being the most lucrative and concerning for the average PPCer. Please keep in mind that these timeframes are, as of right now, only scheduled, and could easily be pushed back to after the holiday shopping season if the companies feel these drastic changes may have adverse effects on online holiday shopping.
What changes will PPC Advertisers have to make?
Aside from the many PPC account changes that will need to take place during the final stages of the Yahoo! Bing Merger, PPC advertisers will also need to choose how to upgrade their current PPC Ad management account. According to Yahoo!, PPC advertisers will have 3 account choices for the transition:
• Keep the existing account, make no changes, and optimize manually.
• Create a totally new account through the adCenter, optimizing and changing as you build it.
• Creating a new account through the adCenter, and importing your old Yahoo! information into it.
I imagine most PPC account managers will choose option number 3, as to not lose all historical data, even though technically all that data will be irrelevant for the new merger searches. This looks to be quite a ride, and TriMark is sitting back waiting to start watching the fun. Prepare now, or face plenty of keyword matching, display position, and daily/monthly budgeting issues when the transition takes place. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
What do you think will happen with the Yahoo! Bing Search Alliance? Will their combined forces help take a chunk out of Google? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please share.
6 Comments
Yahoo! is asking all current advertisers to log into their accounts and initiate the transition from within the account. This is more of a demand than suggestion, as advertisers will not have a choice to refuse to go along with the merger.
I assuming if I don’t initiate the transition, I have exercised my choice to refuse to go along.
Jack, i wonder the same myself but overall i’m mostly very excited to see what comes of this merger. We’re hoping this move opens up more doors for our customers and allows the two sites to work together to drive more business and force Google to continue improving the adwords application.
My thoughts ? What a nightmare, dont think binghoo or yabing is a good decision at all. Think its senseless playing with fire and yahoo is risking alienating its user base.
M$ is world renown for being buggy … and their idea of innovation, is to try to copy anything anyone else invents. Think its a bad idea … but doesnt really matter to me … its an aggravation though.
Think google is the big boy on the block and this is not going to threaten their position. Any attempted merger is only going to complicate things for yahoo/bingism. Whereas for google, its just business as usual.
Heaven help us all, if the bing SE, is running M$ products and servers … even M$N cant be that insane … lol, they better leave linux in the drivers seat … cause M$ could mess up a wet dream.
They cant even come out with an OS worth much of anything … why would anyone expect a quality SE from them ?
Our bill with Bing went up 500% without any results. Yahoo has a poor protection from click fraud.
I tried yahoo when they were Overture (nightmare) when yahoo bought them (another nightmare) and when Bing bought them (another nightmare). Google gives me great results for over a decade. I just canceled our Bing account. $1000 down the drain in 3 days. Pay per click on yahoo with big pricey clicks like data recovery is too risky. I think Bing messed up
Wow Harry, thanks for the info. We are actually seeing fairly different results from you, but I definitely appreciate everyone’s input! I actually wrote another blog post on our recent findings a few weeks ago, and it highlights many of the emerging trends we’ve been seeing in our Yahoo!/Bing accounts thus far into the PPC merge.
Check it out here, and let me know what you think:
http://www.trimarksolutions.com/inside/pay-per-click-advertising/emerging-ppc-trends-stemming-from-the-yahoo-bing-merger/
Thanks again Harry. Please keep us up to date with any additional findings!
My name is Jim White. I’ve been with MSN and Yahoo for about 8 years and I went with the BING merger in November, 2010.
In going with the merger I lost around $8,000. to BING adCenter over a 4 month period. Maybe some of you lost money in the same situation.
As you already know in 2010 Yahoo ppc advertising and MSN ppc advertising merged. Prior to this merge I was using both services individually and had both of their tracking codes on my website.
For about 6 months Yahoo and MSN were gearing up their advertisers for this merger into BING. They gave us lots of information to get us ready for the merge but there was one important thing they DIDN’T tell us.
They didn’t tell us to replace our conversion codes with a new BING conversion code.
After I went along with the merge the new company, BING, seemed too good to be true. I thought that BING was now the best thing in the world. Once I went with the merge my conversions doubled!!! My costs, as seen in the BING stats, were cut nearly in half. The first thing I did was start increasing my bids to move into 1st place to take advantage of the cheap business. As the months rolled by I started to see disturbing things in my company’s business stats. My sales were costing me about 25% more than before the merge.
After calling BING to try and find out what was going on it occured to me that both of those old codes (Yahoo and MSN) were each reporting to me a sale. So I was being presented with 2 conversions in my BING stats for every 1 conversion I had. This was verified over the phone by the BING representative. They knew that those old codes were giving false reports and didn’t say a thing about it to their advertisers.
After I suspected this was happening I went to BING, got the new code and placed it on my site while deleting the 2 old codes. Instantly my conversions were cut in half. Over all, I had a period of about 4 months that I was being overcharged.
My costs more than doubled during this time as I increased my bids using this false information from BING. I lost around $8,000 as I stated above and BING, after careful study, has determined there was nothing wrong with all this. They offered me a $1,000 credit.
What happened to me had to have happened to many, many others too.
If you believe you had a spike in costs and false reports you can email me at: eljeffe@candidasupport.org
My intention at this point is to look into a class action suit against BING. If you know other BING advertisers please forward this text to them.