As most all digital marketers already now, Microsoft & Yahoo renegotiated their search partnership last year, which changed how Yahoo serves the paid ads on their search results page. While they used to serve ads solely from the Bing Ads platform, they are now using ads from their own platform, as well as testing out other providers including Google Adwords. Microsoft’s ads are still used for at least 49% of searches, per the new agreement, however the rest of the time Yahoo is free to test.
From an advertiser’s perspective, this agreement creates more work without a return because the advertiser now has to manage 3 accounts instead of just 2 for the same amount of traffic.
I’ve had client accounts live in Yahoo Gemini for months now and the capabilities of the platform are quite…abysmal. While Yahoo has required us to move our accounts over to a new platform, they haven’t made it very user-friendly and provided rarely any ability to optimize those accounts. Plus, there is so little data provided for insight into performance that it’s difficult to know what to do to improve.
Luckily, it doesn’t make that much of an impact for most accounts right now because the traffic volume is so low, but it causes me to wonder… Does Yahoo really have a future planned for Gemini? Is this a long term solution, or will they reach a new partnership agreement and scrap it? 
If Yahoo is going to keep Gemini going long-term, significant improvement needs to be made for advertisers to take it seriously, continue investing in it and properly manage it.
So what do we think? Will Yahoo eventually scratch Gemini once they firm up their plans with either Google or Bing in a new partnership? Will they keep working with multiple partners, or eventually just side with one? Will they keep Gemini running and force us all to manage 3 platforms long term?
Eeesh, I really hope not.
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