London SES – Yahoo and Bing – A competitive choice in search
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London SES – Yahoo and Bing – A competitive choice in search

22nd February 2011

Yahoo and Microsoft search alliance overview was covered by Jon Myers from Yahoo and Mark Richardson from Miscrosoft UK. Mark started by showing the video below.

Why are they working together?
1) Competition
2) Efficiency
3) Customer Service
4) Innovation
5) Performance

How it works
It’s a 10 year deal and will be rolled out in 40 markets. In the US the transition happened in October last year. EMEA is the next time zone to move with the completion date mid 2011.

The partnership focuses specifically on search with both companies still competing on display, email and instant messaging. All advertisers will use Microsoft adCenter and Microsoft will provide algorithmic and paid search results for both companies. Yahoo will support premium advertisers and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers.

How it helps advertisers
The alliance saves you time and effort as it requires one set of campaign management to advertise in both engines.

UK Audience
5 million unique searchers use Yahoo and Microsoft and not Google. Unique searchers are 41% more likely to convert than Google.

Transition process
Quality is the top priority through the transition. The transition has gone well in the US. For more information go to searchalliance.com. During the preparation process you will stick act through the different systems until integration date.

There are 3 transition options:
1) Keep your existing adCenter account
2) Create a new adCenter account and import your Google campaigns
3) Create a new adCenter account and import your Yahoo! structure

What was learned from CA and the US
1) Speculation about significant CPC icreases have not borne out.
2) Increases in CPA and ROI seem to have more than compensated for any CPC business
3) Click volume may not be equivalent to the combined volume of the two platforms due to some audience overlap.

Marin Software researched the US effects and was quoted in their whitepaper saying : “The alliance CPC /ROI consistently outperformed Google since the introduction of the alliance and ended the year with a 20% advantage”

Ad platform considerations
• There are two match types within panama whereas adCenter allows three levels of match types.
• adCenter allows a greater level of Geographic targeting
• There is a lot more scope in excluded keywords compared to panama
• Keyword mapping is slightly different when dealing with singular and plural keywords
• Minimum bids are £0.05
• Budgeting has changed to two levels. Monthly budget is spread evenly over the month until depleted. Daily target does not provide a hard stop. They are close to how Google operates.

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Written By
Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.
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