Following on from my last post, I am running through hot topics discussed on day 1 at SMX Advanced in London. In my last post I discussed the Remarketing For Fun and Profit session.
Today I will discuss the Best Practises With adCenter For Bing & Yahoo session with Jonathan Beeston European client services director at Efficient Frontier, Colm Bracken Lead Search Media Analyst at Microsoft, Matt Lawson VP Marketing at Marin Software and Jon Myers Head of Account Management at Yahoo!
The key topic discussed in this session was how to get your Yahoo Search Marketing & Microsoft adCenter accounts ready for the “transition”, when Microsoft adCenter will run advertising on both Bing and Yahoo.
Uploading Google campaigns to Yahoo & Microsoft
Throughout this session there was on-going debate on whether you should upload a Google campaign to Yahoo and Microsoft, or whether you should create bespoke campaigns for each engine. John Myers, Colm Bracken and Jonathan Beeston were of the opinion that you should create bespoke campaigns. However, I agreed more with Matt Lawson that it’s fine to initially upload the Google campaign to Yahoo/Microsoft to start off with. You should then go on to optimise each engine separately and make full use of each engine’s different tools and opportunities, i.e match type bidding in adCenter. This is especially in-light of Yahoo & Microsoft’s small % market share.
Colm Bracken advised that before the transition, you should transfer your Yahoo Search Marketing campaign to Microsoft adCenter. However, since there are so many differences between Yahoo and Microsoft’s editorial guidelines & PPC implementations this seems like a unnecessary complication and too lengthy a process. I would suggest simply uploading your Google campaign to Microsoft, as their specifications, naming conventions and policies are more alike. As cited above, it is then best to use adCenter’s unique tools to optimise the adCenter campaign s specifically.
Interesting Nuggets of Information
Yahoo & Bing audiences are 41% more likely to convert than the average UK searcher, and 47% more likely to buy online. Conversion rates are likely to be higher on Yahoo & Microsoft as they tend to show less search queries than Google, therefore generate fewer impressions.
In Leapfrogg’s experience we have found Bing audiences to be significantly more likely to convert, with higher conversion rates than Google. Yahoo audiences, however, are often lower quality, and have lower conversion rates than Google. Post Yahoo & Microsoft transition data from the US has indicated that many of Yahoo’s lower quality “search partners” had been removed, therefore we hope that the conversions rates will become higher, and more in-line with adCenter’s.
In response to how Bing was going to gain market share, Colm Bracken cited Microsoft’s upcoming partnerships with Facebook, Nokia and Skype.
In the next blog post I will discuss key points from the Best Practises with Google’s New Ad Features session .