What PPCers Need to Know About the Bing/Yahoo Partnership Update

The Digital Essentials, Part 3

Developing a robust digital strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Part 3 of the Digital Essentials guide series explores five of the essential technology-driven experiences customers expect, which you may be missing or not fully utilizing.

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Back in 2010, Yahoo and Microsoft came together in a search partnership to essentially team up against their giant competitor Google. By partnering, search results on both websites would be run by the same system, Bing Ads. This was beneficial for PPC managers for many reasons.
When the two accounts were separate, PPC managers had to split their time updating each account individually. When roughly 80% of your traffic is coming from Google and 10% is coming from Bing and Yahoo each, it’s really hard to justify spending much time in the Bing and Yahoo accounts. Any efforts would only contribute to a small increase in traffic/revenue. However, once the accounts merged, that merged account now brought in roughly 20% of traffic – and after solid management improvement, some businesses saw increases of up to 30% of traffic coming through Bing/Yahoo. Now that gives you a lot more incentive to update and optimize that Bing Ads account!
Sadly however, this spring Yahoo and Microsoft have renegotiated their agreement. The new deal includes Yahoo’s decision to test out other search partners. Yahoo is now only required to use Bing Ads’ advertising 51% of the time. The rest of the ads will be served through other partners including Google and Yahoo’s own system, Gemini.
So, what does all this mean for the average PPC advertiser? If you don’t want to lose out on the additional traffic you receive on Yahoo, you’ll have to make sure you set up and manage a new Yahoo Gemini account. Going forward, your Bing Ads account may only be utilized half of the time. We’re heading back in time to 2010, regularly managing 2 separate accounts again…
There is no specific date for when any changes will start to go into effect. Changes will be rolling out slowly over the next several months.
If you’re interested in setting up your account with Gemini, you can get started here.