SMB Transition Process

Once the search alliance integration is complete, you will advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing with one account on Microsoft Advertising adCenter.


Transition process


The following checklists will guide you through the steps required for a successful transition. By following the instructions in the transition checklists, you will be ready to transition your accounts with ease and little impact to help your ads go live in adCenter fast.
Prepare Set up Optimise  
Preparation 

Prepare: Get to know how your transition will work


Understand your account transition options. You need to transition your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to Microsoft Advertising adCenter before 18 April, when the ad serving transition will commence. You can now access an easy-to-use portal from your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to migrate your Yahoo! campaigns. We are providing you with your transition options within this portal, so that you may decide which option is best for your business needs. You can either create a new adCenter account or link your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to your existing adCenter account.
   
Learn about adCenter features and how they differ from Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords with the Feature Comparison Guide on www.searchalliance.com/uk.
   
Become an adCenter expert with free online training videos.
Update your ad landing pages for relevance. The relevance of your landing page and ad to a visitor’s search query helps determine your ad’s position in the search results on Yahoo! Search and Bing:
      • Tip 1: Take users to a landing page with content they expect. For each ad, be sure that users see a landing page with content that's relevant to their search term or they may abandon your site. If your ad offers a discount or promotion, your landing page should, too. Using dynamic text can help take them to the appropriate page of your website based on their search term. Also consider using promotional pages for keyword buys, when applicable.
      • Tip 2: Use keywords in landing page text. To help ensure that your keywords are approved, include all of them on your landing page. This also makes your landing page more relevant for those keywords, which can improve your ad's position and may boost your CTR. Remember that site crawlers do not "read" text embedded in images or JavaScript, so keywords must appear as text within these HTML tags: description meta tag, keywords meta tag, paragraph tag, image tag (in the ALT attribute), title tag, list item tag, and Heading tags. To permit Microsoft Advertising adCenter’s editorial crawlers to review your landing pages, check your robots.txt file to ensure any servers hosting landing pages for your ads do not block “adidxbot” or “MSNPTC/1.0”.
      • Tip 3: Make sure your landing page loads quickly and has functional navigation. Many people abandon websites that don’t display within a few seconds. If the load time of your landing page is slow, reduce the number of graphic images or take other measures to help it load faster. Also ensure that the landing page has functional back and close buttons—buttons that take users to an ad can make your landing page seem deceptive.

Integrate the organic search transition to your strategy with SEO Webmaster tools. As part of the Search Alliance, Bing now provides the organic search results for Yahoo! Search in the UK, France, Ireland and the rest of the world. You can use SEO to complement your search campaigns and boost the visibility of your business on search engine results pages. No specific action is required, but if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you should ensure that you have taking into consideration that change. We encourage you to review the Bing webmaster tools and optimise your website for the Bing crawler to help ensure that your site is prominently listed in both Yahoo! Search and Bing organic search results.