Along with Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing are among the most dominant PPC engines on the scene. The transition of the latter’s ad serving to adCenter is already over in the US and Canada. It is now claimed that the combined entities can reach out to about 165 million searchers making use of Microsoft and Yahoo! sites, providing a volume of more than 5.7 billion searches every month.
The Yahoo!-Microsoft Search Alliance is a joint initiative between the two search giants to create a better and more informed choice in the search domain for both consumers as well as advertisers. After the transition, the former account will now only be in a read-only state, whereas adCenter arrives as the platform for managing your respective campaigns so that your search as well as content ads can reach users on Yahoo! Search, Bing etc. It’s the one users need to manage.
Users can still sign, until December 31, in to their Search Marketing account of Yahoo! and transfer the data to Microsoft adCenter with help of the Transition Tool. Another option is to directly visit the adCenter, set up a personal account, and generate campaigns in it.
Global transition roadmap for the search alliance
It will still take time for Yahoo! for worldwide transition to search and advertising platform of Microsoft. Informing about the modalities and timelines of the search alliance, the official site notes: “We shall begin transitioning international markets next year (2011), with all customers and partners globally slated to be fully transitioned by early 2012. We shall give more details about it at a later date. If you have Search Marketing campaigns of Yahoo! in multiple markets, you should carry on using the platform to manage them for all markets barring North America.”
Steps post-transition to Microsoft adCenter
The adCenter is the one platform for serving ads on Bing, Yahoo! Search and partner websites in the US and Canada. It is essential to grasp how the two differ in functionalities and other generic features that they offer. For this a comparison guide from Microsoft adCenter will come in handy.
For example, when you switch your campaigns to adCenter, it is necessary to reset your campaign targeting with adCenter targeting options. With it, you can focus on your target audience based on factors like location and demographics. Accordingly, you can focus your energies on specific days of the week and a time slot.
Just after the transition, you’ll also be prompted to choose an overall distribution channel, and the default setting will not be targeting any particular location.
The adCenter won’t be making any assumptions about a user’s business and its targeting priorities. Ensure to establish respective targeting settings and boost the bids to get traction in today’s competitive marketplace.
