Earlier this month, advertisers running campaigns in Bing Ads and/or Oath Ad Platforms (previously known as Yahoo Gemini) received an email announcing a partnership update between Microsoft and Yahoo’s owner, Verizon. As with many such deals between media giants, the specifics are a bit confusing due to frequent name changes. The main points of the deal are:
Of course, if you advertise on any Bing, Yahoo, or Oath platforms, this deal should trigger a review of your paid search strategy to investigate the benefits you currently get from these platforms and how the changes will likely affect your campaigns.
However, if you don’t currently advertise on these platforms, this deal could provide a reason for you to evaluate using Bing Ads once the transition is complete. It strengthens the value proposition for both Bing and Yahoo and could result in Google losing some market share.
Bing’s ad platform is more widely used than Yahoo Gemini was, so Yahoo ads can reach a broader variety of audiences. And Bing Ads can now reach a wider audience in general: Yahoo properties have an estimated 1 billion views per month, and Yahoo search has more than 39 million unique searchers per month who can’t be reached on other engines.
The increased audiences will almost certainly boost traffic; Microsoft estimates a 10-15% increase in ad clicks in the US. However, the growth in clicks could become a problem for campaigns whose budget can’t accommodate the increase. To anticipate that issue, Microsoft has recommended budget increases during the transition, to accommodate parallel campaigns and traffic growth.
As both Bing and LinkedIn are Microsoft properties, the deal means that Yahoo advertisers will be able to use Microsoft Graph to target audiences more closely using LinkedIn data. Between this greater targeting ability and Yahoo’s unique audience, companies with small or niche B2B markets can pinpoint their audiences much more effectively.
We agree with Microsoft’s recommendation to keep Oath ads running through March 31 and build parallel campaigns in Bing to run March 15-31. However, while Microsoft has advised Bing Ads budget increases of 10-20% or higher, we recommend reviewing your paid search strategy, audiences, and budget to determine what level of budget increase will best serve your company.
As a rule, we recommend gathering end-to-end data accurately and consistently on all ad platforms at all times. That’s especially important during the Oath-Bing transition. Not only will ad performance be vulnerable to issues caused by these changes, KPIs like cost per click and page rankings may vary from one platform to another.
Reaching Yahoo audiences might not seem like much of a benefit; Yahoo is often considered an also-ran among paid search channels. However, depending on the specifics of your business, Yahoo could be a good choice.
Worldwide, Yahoo search is used 3.61% to Google’s 73.4%. It simply cannot deliver the volume of impressions and clicks that Google can. However, within this smaller audience, Yahoo ads can deliver good value, as we’ve discovered for our clients.
A client in the health-and-beauty space used Yahoo exclusively for brand advertising, since generic-term advertising would require a larger audience for the company’s products than Yahoo could provide.
Brand advertising has inherently higher returns than generic-term advertising because of its “warmer” audience, so Yahoo would perform well compared to other channels overall. However, when brand advertising data was segmented out from Google and Bing and apples were compared to apples, Yahoo’s performance was still impressive:
If you’re not certain what impact this deal will have on your company’s paid media advertising, we can help. Our dedicated Bing Ads rep is keeping us posted on this deal as new developments come up, so we’re staying up to date. And if you’re considering expanding into Bing Ads or increasing your investment there, we’d be happy to talk to you about whether it makes sense for your business or not.