Friday, September 17, 2010

Tracking campaign performance through the Bing/Yahoo merger

The Bing and Yahoo advertising platform merger is raising a lot of questions for advertisers. Seems the #1 question from many of our clients lately is “how is this change going to affect our advertising campaigns and our ability to track performance across the two search engines?”

First, let’s start with what we know from our conversations with both Microsoft and Yahoo:

  1. All pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will be administered through the Bing adCenter platform. You will not be able to bid keywords discretely between Bing and Yahoo, and your ad spend will be circulated to buy impressions across Bing and Yahoo search based on the algorithm.
  2. Organic search rankings will continue to be based on the Bing algorithm and will continue to display across Bing and Yahoo search based on their unique SERP (search engine results page) designs. Think of it as a single search engine, with a single algorithm (“algo”), across two unique brands.
  3. Bing adCenter will be the sole administrative and reporting interface, with Yahoo (Panama) being phased out over the next couple of months. Yahoo is currently communicating it will continue to preserve and report historical campaign data through its Panama platform, but that may change at some point. Best practice here would be to start exporting/downloading that data just in case.
  4. As per Bing and Yahoo requirements clients will need to transition their Yahoo PPC campaigns to Bing. Please contact your Bing or Yahoo account manager for details.
  5. The Yahoo Search API will be phased out in the coming months, with the Bing adCenter API prevailing for the export of all campaign and cost data. If you are using the Yahoo API you should receive an email notifying you of the change and instructions on how to make the switch.
  6. Affiliate networks will remain separate for both Bing and Yahoo, with no current plans to merge into a single affiliate advertising network.
Now, let’s discuss how KeyMetric is already positioned to ensure you continue to accurately measure the effectiveness of your advertising investments across both Bing and/or Yahoo:

  1. KeyMetric will continue to accurately track your offline phone calls and online events and conversions in real-time for both Bing and Yahoo as we do today.
    1. Those clients tracking organic search across Bing and/or Yahoo will continue to do so as they do today under the separate Bing and Yahoo Organic Adsource IDs.
    2. Those clients tracking pay-per-click campaigns across Bing and/or Yahoo will continue to do so as they do today, however KeyMetric will rename the PPC Adsource to show in reporting as Bing/Yahoo.
    3. As per Bing and Yahoo requirements clients will need to transition their Yahoo PPC campaigns to Bing. Please contact your Bing or Yahoo account manager for details. Please also contact your KeyMetric Client Engagement Manager to notify them of your transition so we can transfer your Yahoo phone numbers to the new Bing/Yahoo PPC campaign accordingly.
    4. Those clients wanting to separate phone call and conversion reporting between Bing and Yahoo can do so by generating reports grouping the referring domains under the Bing/Yahoo Adsource ID.
  2. For phone analytics clients, you will no longer require a separate pool of phone numbers for Yahoo. All keyword and search term level call tracking will be done under a single Bing/Yahoo Adsource phone number pool. Accordingly, all phone numbers from your Yahoo pool will be integrated into your Bing/Yahoo phone number pool to accommodate combined traffic levels.
  3. We are finalizing integration with the Bing adCenter API to capture and report campaign and cost data in the KeyMetric user interface. We will let clients know when this development is complete.
If you have any additional questions on the Bing/Yahoo merger you can contact your KeyMetric Client Engagement Manager for more information.