The transition of Yahoo! Search ad serving to Microsoft Advertising adCenter is now complete. Advertisers can now reach 33.8% of the U.S. search market totaling 163 million unique searchers using Microsoft and Yahoo! sites (including Yahoo! Search, Bing, and partners), providing a volume of 5.7 billion monthly searches. What does this mean for search marketers?  At a minimum...

  • Your Microsoft budget needs to be raised to accommodate Yahoo! traffic. This is going to be an ongoing process of adjusting budgets  for first few months. If you do not increase your budget you could exhaust your funds before the end of the month and stop receiving traffic.
  • Bing and Yahoo! traffic can't be separated, but you can separate out Yahoo! syndication traffic.
  • Yahoo! has canonical terms which will go away with this merger - now you can have plural terms
  • Unfortunately, Microsoft does not have A/B testing at the ad level yet - perhaps soon...

How have your Paid Search campaigns been impacted by the transition?