If you’re managing paid search campaigns for your company, or your own business, you’ve probably heard the talks the past year over the Yahoo to Bing transition. If you’ve been living on Mars, then you should know that Yahoo paid search ads will soon be running through the Bing AdCenter, but ads will be shown on both Yahoo And Bing sites. Below are some differences in the two campaign managers and some changes you should make to your accounts.
- Character Limits are shorter in Bing. Yahoo has a 40-character limit for ad titles, Bing has a 25-character limit. Yahoo descriptions can be 71 characters, Bing only allows 70. Your ads will look cut off and quite funny if you don’t make these changes. Focus on the benefits of what you’re selling, test your ads, and make sure they are relevant!
- Like Google, Bing treats singular/plural variations and common misspellings as individual words. Yahoo treated them as one word, so you will need to expand your keyword list to ensure you are getting traffic from these modifiers. This helps to give you more control over your keywords and to modify your campaign for the phrases that are not converting.
- Bing minimum bids start at $.05. Yahoo starting bids are $.01, so if any of your keywords are set at this min, they will be automatically increased to $.05. However, they will also be automatically paused to allow you to confirm or make adjustments to the bids.
If you’re not running paid search on Yahoo/Bing, but only focusing on Google, you should reconsider. Where Google still holds the highest share of searches worldwide (65% in June according to comScore), Yahoo/Bing will now gain a larger percentage of the market share (almost 31%!!), and through working with our clients, we have seen that while volume is not as high as Google, we can actually sometimes get a lower cost per conversion/lead by running on Yahoo/Bing. One thing we like to do is get our clients started in Google, then duplicate the campaigns across Yahoo/Bing and modify from there.
For more information, visit the Yahoo Transition Center online or ask your interactive agency for more information.
