What you need to know about the Yahoo and Bing Merger – Unified Marketplace

Yahoo and Bing Merger – Unified Marketplace

The Yahoo-Bing search alliance, also known as Unified Marketplace, is a partnership that means that search results for both organic and paid search campaigns on yahoo.com and bing.com will be powered by the MSN/Bing algorithm.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo shows their desire to increase market share, which now represents about 30% of all searches. This new marriage between the number two and number three search engines will have a significant impact on how search experts plan, manage and optimize campaigns. Subsequently, marketers could see a dramatic impact if the transition is not managed properly.

At first, Yahoo’s users might not notice a change in search listings when their results are driven by Bing’s algorithm. The first thing that most users will notice is a change in paid search ads that appear on Yahoo.com. The Bing algorithm is much more sensitive to campaign quality and the relevancy of keywords to landing pages—especially when compared to Yahoo’s algorithm that is based heavily on click thru rates. Therefore, paid search marketing options for refined, long tail keywords could diminish as landing page quality and relevancy will suffer.

Implications for Paid Search

• Decrease in impressions and click volume
• Increase in CPCs
• Potential Increase in CVR

Paid search experts need to be much more strategic with their campaigns from ad copy to keyword-specific landing pages. The Bing algorithm shows only the most relevant keywords/ ads and landing pages for campaigns, so it is essential that best practices are required. Marketers that use one landing page for their search efforts will lose major ground to more strategic campaigns. They will also see a large decrease in impression share from Yahoo and Bing search traffic. Implementing these mandatory best practices will benefit Google campaigns as well because they will help increase Google’s quality score, decrease CPCs and increase overall market share on targeted keywords.

Initially, Unified Marketplace is going to be a very unpredictable channel as numerous advertisers have not historically managed a Bing paid search account. With new advertisers entering the market, CPCs will be all over the place with practitioners making quick adjustments to their new campaigns. Other advertisers will also be testing the waters with Unified Marketplace and trying to identify a new ranking/ bidding model for their accounts. However as previously stated, a drop in impressions and traffic should be expected with a stricter algorithm.

Since traffic from Yahoo and Bing reach different audiences, certain types of accounts will suffer from the inability to exclude or manage each audience separately. B2B campaigns, for example, do not perform well with Yahoo’s audience profile.

Overall user experience with Unified Marketplace will improve. As a result of a smarter algorithm, paid search managers need to be much more strategic with campaign architecture and structure, keyword grouping, ad copy strategies, deep linking search traffic, keyword specific landing page development and overall user experience throughout all stages of paid search (pre and post click).