Bing Yahoo Search Alliance

At SES Toronto last week we had the chance to chat to the folks at the Bing booth. The talk was mostly about the alliance between Bing and yahoo and what that will mean to advertisers when this all happens later this year.

The Bing algorithm will be powering the platform and your campaigns will be running across all the Yahoo and Microsoft sites. I don’t have a massive dataset but I can say that the conversion rates we get from our Bing campaigns are higher than the equivalent adwords conversion rates.

The most obvious benefit is to those advertisers who are currently advertising on both the Bing (Microsoft) and yahoo platforms - you will now be able to use one platform to access both Search Engines. You’ll also need only one customer service rep - an area which I have found Microsoft really shines. Any small business will be pleasantly surprised by the fact that they can speak to someone on the phone who will talk them through their advertising campaign and help them drive better results.

Those businesses using just one of the platforms will benefit from an increased customer base without having to do anything. You’ll be receiving emails with all the information you need for the transition.

Better Search Engine Marketing research tools

One of the things that we’re excited about is the effect the greater quantity of data will have on the already excellent Microsoft Adcenter research tools. Adcenter labs already has some great tools for researching your target market demographics and determining the commercial intent of your keywords. It will be interesting to see if the newly available data will increase the power of the toolset.

So if you’re not advertising on Bing or yahoo - the increased market share they’ll have soon should be reason enough for you to move some of your eggs out of one basket. For more information you can check out www.searchalliance.com