Microsoft Says Hello to 'Bing Ads'

Bing Ads. That’s the new name for Microsoft’s adCenter, and it will be used to self-manage search ads on the new Yahoo! Bing Network.

In an announcement on Sunday on its Bing Ads blog, Microsoft said that the new name also represented “an improved experience with new features” for managing marketing campaigns. It noted that recent improvements have included a new web interface, improved ad rotation controls and new tools that better enable the management of multiple accounts by agencies.

10-Year Agreement

The Yahoo! Bing Network is the name of the collaborative advertising ecosystem for placing keyword-based ads in search results, combining the resources of Yahoo! Search, Bing search and the two companies’ various partner sites. Partner sites include Facebook, Amazon, Viacom and WebMD, plus such networks as The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

Microsoft community manager Tina Kelleher wrote on the Bing Ads blog that “the Yahoo Bing Network is comprised of 151 million unique searchers in the US who are likely to spend 24 per cent more than the average searcher, and likely to spend five per cent more than Google searchers in the US." In the U.S., the companies said, the Network reaches 46 million unique searchers who are not using Google.

Worldwide, the Yahoo! Bing Network said that it reaches 489 million unique searchers, 92 million of whom do not use Google. Another competitive advantage: Bing will be the default engine on the recently-announced Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablets.

In July, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year agreement, under which Bing acts as the technology behind Yahoo! Search, Microsoft integrates Yahoo! search technologies into the combined search platform, Yahoo! serves as the combined sales agent, and AdCenter — now Bing Ads — serves as the self-service ad platform. Display advertising will continue to be handled separately by each company.

30 Percent

The combined effort of these second and third-place search engines will reach about 30 percent of the search market, as the two companies position themselves against the 600-pound gorilla, Google.

Microsoft will deliver eighty-eight percent of search ad revenues generated by Yahoo! sites to Yahoo!, which is expected to result in more than a quarter billion dollars annually to that company.

Last week, Microsoft announced a new ad campaign, called Bing it On, to promote its search engine. As part of that campaign, it commissioned a study of 1000 individuals, with the results showing that users prefer Bing results over Google’s. It is also offering a Bing It On Challenge, which shows search results of five user-generated queries side-by-side, without either the Bing or Google brand, so that users can choose which engine provides the most relevant answers.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com