FastPivot’s Director of Strategy, Grant Henry, explains how the Yahoo! and MSN-Bing merger will affect Yahoo! Store Merchants:
The projected launch date of Yahoo! and MSN/BING search alliance is October of this year – not very far away! What does this merger mean for you and your business? If you are currently active with PPC in Yahoo! Search Marketing, then you will have some work to do.
After the merger is complete, the Yahoo! Search Marketing system will no longer be used. All of the PPC ads being served on Yahoo.com, Bing.com, and their content networks will be completely driven with MSN Adcenter. This means that any PPC campaigns you have running in Yahoo! will have to be migrated into MSN Adcenter before the launch in October.
At some point in August or September, when you log into Yahoo! Search Marketing you will be greeted with a few options for getting your campaigns into the new system. Details on the migration options are not available at this point, but we know there will be an assisted option which should at least partially migrate your campaigns into the MSN Adcenter system.
After you migrate your campaigns, the work begins.
There are many differences between how Yahoo! and MSN handle their campaigns. There will need to be adjustments to match type, mapping, excluded phrases, ad length, geo-targeting and other changes. These changes may or may not require you to do some work to your campaigns to match the requirements of the new system.
At this time, the only big to-do we are giving our clients is to create an MSN Adcenter account if you do not have one already. (Sign up for MSN Adcenter) Go ahead and get some ads up and running in MSN to familiarize yourself with the system. This will be your new home base in the months to come for Yahoo! ad activity as well.
Stay close to the FastPivot blog in the weeks to come for more specific details on what changes will be required to be successful in the transition from Yahoo! Search marketing to MSN Adcenter.
Resources links:
The Yahoo/MSN Search Alliance website
Yahoo’s video describing the alliance
Yahoo’s FAQ about the alliance
Feel free to contact FastPivot with any questions you may have.
