An update to Bing’s webmaster tools was announced today. Webmaster tools provides valuable insight into the search engine’s view of your website. Unlike Web Analytics, which shows you what traffic came to your site, webmaster tools tells you what search phrases triggered the Search Engine to display your content in the search results and if that content was clicked or not.
Bing’s new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site is displayed for the wrong things, and what was actually clicked. However, since it doesn’t show the URL that was displayed or your position in the results (you can preform an actual search to figure this out), you don’t have a compete picture of what content is working and what isn’t.
Crawl errors are recorded and graphed, but Bing provides no specifics to guide you as to what the errant links are or what they are linked from. And the tool lacks reports for incoming links, linked phrases, and ranking information.
In summary, Bing’s new interface is slicker looking than the previous product and has some attractive charts. However I am hoping this is just the first pass and that Bing will flow-in additional information to expose the critical details that are currently missing.
SEM Huntsville, Web Analytics bing, Web Analytics, webmaster tools
I attended a seminar today that discussed the Microsoft (AdCenter) /Yahoo (Panama) transition. I have hit several preliminary discussions on this topic at conferences, but this was the first one that had any real information about the Microhoo transition.
The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects search results and paid search campaigns (not other services such as Yahoo/Hotmail mail, Yahoo/Live log-ins etc).
After the transition, all organic and paid search results on Yahoo and Bing displayed will come from Microsoft. Presentation of the results may differ, but rank and ad order will appear the same in search results for both.
Once complete, the plan is to use the AdCenter interface to manage and view the performance of ads running on Yahoo and Bing with a single bid strategy across both engines. There was a good deal of discussion about improvements being made to that AdCenter desktop to provide better support and performance for very large campaigns. The interface will have improved import/export capabilities.
Yahoo users will see new features including.
- Exact, Phrase, and Broad (formerly advanced) match options
- Match types will not apply to negatives (AdCenter is adding ability to have more Negatives)
- Separate bidding for misspellings, plural, and singular terms
- Create custom reports, improved keyword tools
- Content Network support
- 30 character headline drops to 25 (!)
- Microsoft’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion method
- A search query report will be available.
- No decision yet on how Yahoo conversion tracking will be migrated/supported, but it sounded like Microsoft conversion codes will be the norm going forward.
- Bidding/Trademark policies will be merged into a single policy.
The transition sounded somewhat like the transition from Overture to Yahoo Marketing. If you already have campaigns running in Yahoo (Panama), you won’t be forced to migrate (at least not immediately). Once Panama users migrate their accounts to the AdCenter, any accumulated conversion history from old campaigns will be lost.
More information at:
SEM Huntsville adcenter, AdCenter Desktop Beta, bing, microhoo, microsoft, yahoo marketing
The big news in the press today is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal. I have already received questions about this from a couple of clients, so I thought it best to expand here.
In the deal the search brand at Yahoo will remain to be “Yahoo Search” but it will be “Powered by Bing.” There will be no immediate changes however until they get regulatory approval, following approval the integration effort will move forward (expected early 2010).
What about allocating advertising dollars?
In the deal it appears that some mix of Yahoo Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter advertising will continue. It was reported that Yahoo ads will continue to run in the Yahoo properties with Microsoft getting 12% of the revenue and some Yahoo ads will be syndicated over the Microsoft network. Bing will run ads on Microsoft properties (and may run some ads on the Yahoo network as well), but the details are unclear at this point. It will take some time for all this to shake out, with conversions rates ultimately determining where ad dollars will need to be spent.
What about optimizing for Bing?
This is really a non-starter, Google’s market share is so large that doing anything that could compromise your traffic from that engine would be a mistake. Unless Bing’s market share increases more than just picking up Yahoo traffic, there is really no point – as long as the feature sets remain similar. If features emerge that are unique to Bing, and could be supported without impacting your Google traffic, then optimizating for those features would be in order.
Press Release: http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/pressroom/Default.aspx
SEM Huntsville, SEO Huntsville adcenter, bing, yahoo marketing
