Yahoo and Microsoft Merge Search
Yahoo! and Microsoft have now received the regulatory clearance to form a new search partnership. This is a huge deal and milestone of a first step in both of their strategies to help reach an even larger audience with greater ease and efficiency. Let’s discuss some of the hopes and changes.
They don’t yet have any immediate changes posted to their search or marketing features and offerings. Both companies are working to make this change seamlessly and to best benefit their customers. It appears that their time frame is end of year or prior to the 2010 holiday season.
This Yahoo and Microsoft merger will help you reach more customers by a total of reaching 150,000,000 searchers and get about 60% more searches than on Yahoo alone. There are other unannounced plans to enhance their way of offering searches and search marketing. Search advertising customers will save time and money but using one place to manage you accounts through the numerous networks these two giants own, operate and are partner with online for search engines. Furthermore, both are going to be rolling out new features and innovations over the months following the Yahoo and Microsoft search engine merger.
– 05/05/2011
Update, here we are much later and still waiting to see what is going to happen here. It’s still in talks but what does it mean for SEO while we wait? Well, not much. Bing offered many new features Microsoft hoped would put them ahead some (I say some since they have to know the changes they implemented weren’t going to cause everyone to jump ship and bail on Google0. Just keep plugging away with a focus on priority SEs and wait for the roll-out. My guess is that they will merge services on Bing and search will become the attractor for eyes but not for businesses.
– 06/15/2011
Well, while it is nice to have one specific place to control both site’s ads it would be nice to have a bit more control specific to each network. For instance I’d love to separate bidding on top 1st place on the search engine’s pay-per-click position but I should be able to set it differently per site based on ROI. Not only is it not smart to assume they are the same, but they return different listings meaning it simply is not the same. The return isn’t as good as Google even with identical ads. The budget has to be raised on Bing/Yahoo much higher for less views and even worse CTR. After some adjustment there is traction but it’s far from Google’s CTR and ROI numbers. Plus, ads on the day we setup the account didn’t show for days while customer service tried to figure it out. Turned out all accounts setup that day had the same issue. It’s all fixed now and we’re continuing to use here for our sites and a few clients even interested in Bing/Yahoo advertising.
