The Bing and Yahoo Search Alliance Update

August 17, 2010 0 Comments

We try to cover the stories as they happen as the Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo comes together. Today, I received an email update from Bing and Yahoo stating that this is the week and Bing will finally start powering all of Yahoo’s English based organic searches in the United States and Canada. While they have been doing some beta testing here and there, this is the launch week to fully take over these searches. I know many that are eager to see if this search alliance will do anything for Bing’s growth toward Google, so this milestone is an important one. Here is the email from the Search Alliance describing their newest milestone.

This is an exciting week for Bing as we reach another major milestone in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This week, Bing will begin powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada.

After this organic transition is complete, Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches, which is 31.6 percent of the search market share in the United States and 8.6 percent share in Canada.¹ You can take advantage of this traffic by using search engine optimization (SEO) to complement your search campaigns and boost the visibility of your business. Bing webmaster tools can help you troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps, and view statistics about your sites—all to improve your visibility on Bing. Get started by visiting the Bing Toolbox or watching our video.

Advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing through adCenter
If you currently advertise on Yahoo! Search, you will soon have the option to use a transition tool in Yahoo! Search Marketing that will walk you through the steps to transition your Yahoo! Search campaigns into Microsoft Advertising adCenter. This transition tool is currently in testing with a select group of advertisers. We plan to make it available to all Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers in the coming weeks, giving you the ability to advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing with one adCenter ad buy.

To help you prepare for a successful transition, please continue to work with your existing support contacts and visit the Microsoft Transition Center for the latest information about the new marketplace. Remember, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. However, if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may choose to defer the transition to 2011.

We appreciate your business and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

Sincerely,

Your partners in the search alliance, Yahoo! and Microsoft

A Common Paid Search Mistake

August 12, 2010 1 Comment

A question that I am frequently asked is how someone can maximize their paid search account. It doesn’t matter if they are advertising on Google, Yahoo (now using Bing’s results), or Bing. While there are many ways for someone to get the best results out of pay per click advertising, there is one common mistake that I find in almost every account I look at. The enemy of every online marketer: High Cost Keywords. You would be surprised how many people start a new campaign or ad group without looking over the keywords to see how much they cost and how much traffic they may bring. This mistake is not just made with PPC novices, but also people and companies that have been doing it for a long time.

High cost keywords can destroy a well developed campaign in a matter of hours, fully depleting the daily spend and leaving your campaign paralyzed until the next day comes around. I tell everyone that I consult for to make sure and take a few extra steps to ensure that there are no high cost keywords hiding in their keyword builds. It is a simple thing to fix, but not many actually do it. There are many keyword estimation tools out there that can help you decide which keywords are right for you, but one of my favorite and easiest to use it the Google Keyword Estimator. This tool is free to use and can estimate cost and clicks for up to 5000 keywords per batch. Google has introduced a new beta for this tool, but I prefer to use the old legacy platform. After running a simple search, you can find out if the keywords that you want to use will be searched on and how much they will cost. Simple, effective, and will save you a lot of money.

I understand that most that use PPC advertising want to get visitors and conversions, but just because you put a high cost keyword in, doesn’t mean you will get what you want. In most cases, high cost keywords will bring you traffic, but rarely bring the conversions. This is a big no-no in paid search advertising. You have to justify your ad spend with conversions, so unless you have thousands to spend and are just looking for visitors, leave the high cost keywords out. How much do you think the word apple will cost you in a day? Take a look at a few of the top apple terms…..

I did this search on the basis of just $0.50 per click and no budget to show the potential of what these type of keywords would bring. Does your advertising budget have this much per day? You might ask why anyone would put these terms in their search ad groups, but I have seen companies that just sell aftermarket ipod, iphone, and ipad accessories have these terms in their account. They never could understand why they were wasting so much money and never getting any conversions. The data speaks for itself I believe. Most people that search for these broad terms are notorious for not purchasing. They are in the research stage of the buying cycle. People that search for terms that usually contain 3-5 terms have a better chance of purchasing than broad searchers do. If you don’t sell these items, then you never need to be bidding on them. You will never win and you will end up broke. Do yourself and your company a favor and take an extra 5 minutes to put all your keywords through a traffic estimator and strip out all the high cost keywords. You will be happy that you did.

Bing Cashback Termination Notice & New Bing Shopping

July 20, 2010 2 Comments

Today, I received an email from Bing Cashback letting me know of their termination notice. While I was aware that they were getting rid of Bing, I wasn’t sure what they had planned on doing for all the merchants that were in their program. Well, inside the termination notice email, Microsoft lets us all know. They are now starting Bing Shopping, which will be Free to all merchants. This is going to be similar to Google Shopping, or as some of you still call it, Froogle. This could be a direct attempt to compete with Google on a shopping platform, or it could be a way to get some research before they start charging merchants. Either way, it is free, so get in while you can and enjoy from free sales from Bing. Below is the email:

Dear Merchant,

As we recently announced, the Bing cashback program is retiring on July 30, 2010. This email serves as notice that your cashback merchant agreement for Bing cashback Search and/or Bing cashback Shopping will terminate July 30, 2010, at midnight Eastern Time.

We want to introduce you to our new, free Bing Shopping program, but first we’d like to review the steps you should take to prepare for the discontinuation of Bing cashback.

Take action by the end of July

We’ve noticed that you have not been participating in Bing cashback recently, so most of your preparation may already be complete. To help you achieve a smooth customer transition, you should remove references to the cashback program for your ad copy and all pages of your website by end of day July 30. Please be sure that you have done the following:

Remove the cashback logo () and other cashback graphics or references from all pages of your website.

Remove links to cashback terms and conditions.

Unwrap your cashback URLs from your ads in adCenter.

Remove cashback from your ad copy.

You should also remove the cashback pixel-tracking code from your website on July 31. If you are still participating in cashback, doing so before July 31 may cause issues for your customers.

Please sign in to our Merchant Center to ensure we have the most up to date contact information for you. If you have questions about the end of Bing cashback, please see our Frequently Asked Questions or you may contact cashback help at cshbkhlp@microsoft.com.

New Bing Shopping program

As the cashback program retires, we are announcing a new Bing Shopping program that will enable merchants to list their product catalogs on Bing for free*. This program lets you offer a broader set of products. The Bing Shopping program will commence on July 31, 2010 and will be governed by the Merchant Data Feed Terms of Use. For more information, visit the Bing Shopping page.

If you are interested in being part of the new Bing Shopping program, please contact us at freeshop@microsoft.com to initiate the registration process.

We hope that you will decide to participate in the Bing Shopping program. We look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft Advertising Bing cashback team

The Death of Bing Cashback

June 10, 2010 1 Comment

Last week Microsoft said that they planned on ending Bing Cashback. It has been a year since its launch, but Microsoft just never saw the potential in it. It is most likely due to the fact that most customers did not realize that they could receive up to 15% cash back from certain retailers. As of July 30th, Bing Cashback will be shut down for good, hopefully to be replaced by an even better program. Here is the letter that Microsoft sent to all of its advertisers.

Microsoft Advertising
Dear Merchant,

We are writing to let you know that Microsoft has decided to discontinue the Bing cashback program. After 9:00 P.M. PST on July 30, 2010, we will no longer offer this program on the Bing search results or Bing Shopping pages. This will also be the last day consumers will be able to buy through the Bing cashback program.

What this means for you
As we continue to evolve both the consumer and advertiser experiences for Bing, we will pursue different avenues in order to offer great shopping experiences to consumers and great advertising experiences for our advertisers. We’ve prepared some frequently asked questions about the program closure. Please keep these key points in mind in the coming months:

This is a great time to spend your cashback budget to drive mid-summer sales. You can increase sales payout rates to the maximum outlined in your merchant agreement to help use up the funds in your piggybank before July 30, 2010. Microsoft will continue to contribute to your piggybank until that date.

After July 30, Bing Shopping will continue to operate as it does today, but without the presence of cashback. We’re continually improving the Bing Shopping experience to help shoppers discover products, compare offers, and buy seamlessly online. In addition to current features like consumer reviews and ratings and Visual Search, we’ll also offer a more streamlined Bing Shopping experience and better shopping integration with Bing.com.

We are developing a new shopping program that will offer greater flexibility than you experienced with cashback. You’ll be able to provide a broader set of products in Bing Shopping searches, with little or no extra work. The program is scheduled to begin later in 2010, and we’ll provide more details soon.

What this means for your customers
Bing cashback consumers can continue to shop and earn cashback through 9:00 P.M. PST on July 30. They can redeem all of their acquired cashback earnings consistent with the cashback terms and conditions, as well as access the Bing cashback customer support system through July 30, 2011—a full 12 months after the program ends. Consumers can learn more about the discontinuation of cashback on the Bing web page.

Thank you
We would like to thank the more than 1200 cashback advertisers who joined us for this two-year journey. With over 82 million Bing searchers,* we are still strongly committed to being the destination for all commerce-related searches. Please stay tuned for more online shopping innovations from Microsoft, and again, check out the frequently asked questions to learn more about these changes.

Sincerely,

Microsoft Advertising Bing cashback Team

News Corp Not Keeping Up with Technology

November 11, 2009 0 Comments

News Corp’s CEO Rupert Murdoch sat down with Sky News the other day to talk about the News business and the internet. You can find the video below, but we are going to give you the jist of it because frankly it made us laugh. News corp owns the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and many other news outlets for those of you who were not aware. There is a chance that these sites will no longer be able to be found on Google or other search engines for that matter.

In the interview, Murdoch said that he was not happy with how his content was being found on search engines and other places on the web, but what I assume he was not aware of is how much traffic google is sending to the WSJ. According to Hitwise, Google accounts for 25% of the traffic sent to WSJ. This is a substantial amount of visitors to the site, but it will all be lost if he gets his way. Rupert Murdoch told the interviewer after a question of blocking the search engines that “I think we will”. This is just crazy talk because people are no longer willing to pay for news. Even loyal subscribers think what News corp is planning on doing is just out there. This is just a problem with the style of businesses that CEO’s like Murdoch are used to. They are in the generation that was not used to the internet and how it works. They are just catching up to speed and do not like what they see. If the board of News Corp was smart, they will decline his proposals and maybe hint that it is time for Murdoch to retire from this post. They need to take their media organization in a new direction and old style thinking is not going to do it. News Corp will become a sinking ship if they carry out their plans to cut off search engines. See the interview below for yourself. Please comment on what you think as we would love to know.

iMark Interactive