Recently, Microsoft and Yahoo announced their intention to create an ad/sales partnership, involving the transition of advertising customers from Yahoo’s search marketing desktop to Microsoft’s ad centre.
As regular users of both search marketing tools, the team at Gillissa believe this will be effective, fundamentally because it will be easier to manage two desktop tools rather than three!
Though the date of the transition is a long way off and unclear, there are a few factors to be wary of if you are an advertiser on Yahoo or both advertising channels.
Due to the nature of which the accounts are built on Microsoft and Yahoo, significant changes to the methods used for Yahoo were inevitable.
The two major factors to be wary of involve keywords and adverts.
Currently, for Yahoo, advertisers have a 40 character threshold for advert headlines, whereas Microsoft sets a maximum of 25 characters. This could see Yahoo advert headlines cut off at the 25 character threshold, which could make the ads ineligible to display.
Even more importantly, Yahoo does not incorporate similar keywords as individual terms, unlike Microsoft and Google, who both classify singular and plural versions of words, as well as misspelt variants, as individual terms to enhance your advert reach. This therefore means that your Yahoo keyword list needs to be revised and expanded in time for the transition.
All in all, this should see the combined Microsoft/Yahoo search marketing tool use similar advertising principles as Google, making it easier to manage across these advertising channels.