In January, Microsoft and Verizon Media announced a major update to their partnership. Starting in March, Bing Ads will be the sole advertising platform for Yahoo and AOL ads. We’re excited about these changes because it will become easier for Paid Search Managers to run their campaigns.
What are the benefits of this change?
According to the Bing Blog, there are many benefits of this strengthened partnership. Marketers will have a single global platform to create search advertising campaigns that reach audiences across the Bing, Yahoo and AOL networks. Microsoft is also predicting a 10-15% increase in clicks across the Bing Ads marketplace for customers targeting the US.
How will compliance change?
The updated partnership will likely have a positive impact on compliance efforts. Bing’s trademark infringement rules are stricter and more brand-friendly than Yahoo and AOL’s rules, therefore you will have more control and ability to protect your brand through Bing Ads. For example, although the Yahoo advertising platform does not permit search arbitrage, which is when an advertiser buys a search ad and sends the unsuspecting consumer to another set of full-page ads, historically, their enforcement of these rules has been inconsistent. Bing and Google, however, consistently remove these bad ads.
In our work with search engines, we have also found that Bing responds relatively quickly to takedown requests. With the addition of Yahoo’s ads to Bing’s review process, the time for review may increase, but we anticipate the quality of the review to be high.
We are unsure at this time how the shift of Yahoo Ads to the Bing platform will affect the specific steps our customers follow when they submit ads for takedown through BrandVerity’s Paid Search Monitoring tool. Our expectations are that trademark owners will be able to submit ads through Bing’s existing process, however, we will update as we learn more.
When will the changes happen and in what countries?
This change will eventually roll out across all countries where Yahoo serves Bing advertising, however, the rollout will begin in the US between March 15 and March 31st. At this time, Bing hasn’t built a road map for the rollout for other geographies. We will update this blog post as more information becomes available.
