Yahoo & Bing partnership A must-have for PPC advertisers?
With the ink on the contract still wet and still several months away from anything going live, speculation is mounting as how a Yahoo!/Bing.com partnership will re-shape the digital marketing landscape.
There is no doubt that if you use paid search as a part of your online marketing strategy, Google has been front and center and an obvious choice for the past few years. On the other hand, Microsofts search engine has all-too-often been viewed by marketers as a peripheral option and a non-essential media buy with not enough traffic to justify the time you would have to spend implementing and managing it. Because of this, it was common to simply be left off of the schedule entirely.
Since the new deal could deliver Bing as much as 28%* of the US search market share, or around 4.1 billion monthly searches, from the perspective as a marketer, the question is this; Is Bing now a must-have on the PPC media schedule?
Although the partnership will leave Bing far behind Google in terms of market share, Microsoft has eliminated a competitor and now has a fairly compelling argument to take to advertisers.
Assuming that Google does have to share the paid search media schedule with Bing, this perhaps leads to a more concerning question for the search giant; where is the budget going to come from?
As always, we would love to hear your thoughts
(* Yahoo! Sites 20.1%, Microsoft Sites 8.4% ComScore June 09)
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Comments
Dave Durbin
Thanks for the great read. We manage a number of small business accounts and provide Website and Blog Design, SEO, SEM, Internet Marketing and Social Media Advertising for them all based on need and target audience. Bing – Live and Yahoo had a major problem, Google. This problem still exists and now Google only has to defend against 1 common player. Without some differentiation I fear this may fail. Google was founded on Search. That is how they built their brand and they have the best engine out today. Looks like it’s time to get it on. This is a very interesting time to be in this industry and we all should be following this closely. Once again great post.
Bob Morgan
I closed my ppc accounts on both Yahoo and MSN (Bing) when the traffic fell to nothing and the time required to figure out “how to do this and how to do that” wasn’t worth it.
I will definitely take a wait and see attitude. If you “know the Google ropes” and take advantage of all the opportunities that Google makes available it just doesn’t figure Yahoo/Bing will ever make much progress with webmasters. I assume they will be going after the big corporate bucks. BOB
Dennis Zhukov
I think it’s still too early to switch one’s attention in form of PPC to anything else from Google. Bing-Yahoo coalition is trying to make a buzz but let’s wait and see which direction it would flow naturally when their paid campaing slows down a little bit.
harvey
While i agree that the low volulme of traffic generated by MSN and Yahoo is a problem i still believe they have their part to play. using ad serving tools like Dart Search, Omniture, Mediaplex, Search Ignite etc. makes it easy to make multiple changes across engines cutting out the differences between each engines interface. Similarly MSNs desktop tool has a fantastic import tool (reall, really awesome, just push a button to copy your google account).
Realistically it is going to take (in PPC terms) a very long time for the changes affected by this deal to impact us.
i guess my real concern was highlited in a recent article in NMA’s Cooper on Search. Yahoo’s sale force is no where near the level of ad center. are they going to step up their game and relay developments back to us?
unlimited
As advertisers we like adcenter for the great conversion rates of Bing’s traffic.. With Yahoo though we are forced to buy clicks from junk partners that send nothing but fake clicks.. It’s a daily job to monitor all the new bad-domains to block.. And you have to PAY for all that..
With the current merge of Yahoo and Bing let’s hope the new “team” will do it RIGHT by giving the advertisers the choice to pay only for real yahoo/bing searches.. just like Adwords and adcenter allow (for now?).
Just my 2 cents
Cheers!
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