The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results, and help improve monetisation for partners.
Already implemented in the U.S. and Canada, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance enables both companies to maintain their own search brands and differentiated consumer search experiences, while the back-end technologies for algorithmic and paid search results on both Yahoo! Search and Bing are powered by Microsoft platforms.
Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, large agencies, resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft Advertising adCenter will be the platform for all search marketing campaigns.
More volume, less effort.
Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new, unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of 529 million unique searchers worldwide1. In the UK and France, Yahoo! and Microsoft will combine their existing marketplaces. In other markets throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America, this transition will be seamless as Microsoft is already an existing Yahoo! partner, drawing from the Yahoo! marketplace.
Timing
We are working toward completing the paid search transition by the end of April. However, we are keen to bring you the benefits of our combined audiences sooner and may accelerate the transition in these markets if we can do so while still maintaining a quality experience. Both companies are committed to providing advertisers and partners with ample notice prior to the transition of their market, and working with them to plan and prepare for a smooth transition with quality. For now it is business as usual, advertisers should continue to manage and optimise their campaigns on Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft Advertising adCenter separately. |
