Ready or Not, Here We Combine

Go to Yahoo.com and search for something. Scroll to the bottom of the page. See the “Powered by Bing” note? The Search Alliance is already in place for organic search results. That was step 1 of the transition.

Step 2 involves the paid search results. Yahoo has already run tests delivering Bing ads for a small percentage of the search queries that occur. This transition is being rolled out to all US advertisers over the next two months. Staging in Microsoft’s adCenter management program should occur in September, with ads being completely converted and live in October.

If you haven’t worked with adCenter before, or you’ve never considered advertising anywhere other than Google, there’s a lot to catch up on. The Search Alliance will make up almost a third of the search landscape. That’s still only half of Google’s search share, but it’s enough that you should at least consider diversifying. If you don’t know where to start, check out the Search Alliance Readiness checklist we created for advertisers who aren’t sure how the upcoming merger will affect their paid search campaigns, then tell us how we can help.