Beware the Ides of…PPC

By Pamela Nelson, Director of Client Delivery

Yahoo! + Bing ≠ Google

Last October, Yahoo! and Bing began merging platforms in an effort to gain more market share and compete on more even ground with Google.  One set of keywords and ads is served on both the Yahoo! and Bing engines and managed collectively.  It is not possible to determine performance at the individual engine level.  At this point in time, the combination has only led to a 30.8% market share, with 5.6 billion monthly searches.  So while search volume has increased, click volume has decreased.

While the best of both platforms are being combined into the single Microsoft adCenter platform, it is critical to know the differences between Bing and Yahoo! and Bing and Google.  Here are some of the differences that you should be aware of:

• Yahoo! keyword mapping was based upon canonicalization meaning that many keywords were bucketed into a single keyword.  For example, misspellings and plurals were all associated with a single keyword.

• Bing keyword mapping is based upon normalization meaning that each keyword must be specifically represented.  Misspellings and plurals are treated as unique keywords.

• Therefore, keyword coverage now through the Microsoft adCenter platform may be lacking.  It is wise to expand the keywords to make sure ads are showing for all possible keywords.

• Ads in Bing will automatically show the best performing ads within an ad group 90% of the time and the other ads 10% of the time.  It will be difficult to determine if new ad text will perform better because it will be rotated with the 10% of ads, unless the best performing ad is paused (but why would you want to pause your best performing ad?).

• Bing does not provide an option for budgeting where the ads can be shown evenly throughout the day.  Therefore, the budget is spent as quickly as possible, and once the daily budget has been met, the ads are paused for the remainder of the day.  Since there are likely less competitors later in the day due to the budget pause, cost per clicks are likely to be lower.  It might be wise to investigate day parting to only run later in the day.

In all fairness to Microsoft, many improvements have been made to the adCenter platform including the addition of the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool which is a free keyword research and optimization tool that provides actionable data.  We look forward to continuous improvement in the adCenter platform so advertisers can effectively and efficiently promote their businesses on all three search engines.