The Microsoft and Yahoo deal announced last week is
going to take at least 18 months to come to fruition and will
result in a combined UK share of Yahoo/Bing search traffic at about
8%, so will it change your online marketing plans?
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz explains the deal: “We have two giants
(Yahoo and Microsoft) who are willing to go at it with each other
and spend a lot of money. In essence, we can get virtually all of
our search revenue at no cost because Microsoft wants to make the
investment and wants to win. That just frees me up to invest in a
better portal, better display, better advertising. We have to be
realistic, it’s nice to say you want to do everything. All of us in
the economic times have learned focus is more important than
spreading the wealth around.”
If you run PPC (pay per click) campaigns, the main question may
be whether ‘BingHoo’ traffic is going to convert to extra clicks
and whether it is worth your time administering two campaigns
across separate platforms.
Microsoft has tried to make its platform interoperable with
Google. Its account mangers will even offer to port your Google
account across for no charge, but with such a troublesome past it's
hard to turn around such a negative brand perception.
Its widely understood that PPC return on investment from Bing
and Yahoo combined is marginally better than Goolge’s. But offset
this ROI against weak traffic volumes and challenges associated
with optimising separate accounts, if you are anything other than a
big PPC spender, you end up with a neutral to negative case for
marketing spend on ‘BingHoo’.
The bottom line is 8% volume may not be enough for the majority
of UK advertisers to shift their efforts exclusively from Google
PPC, even with easier campaign management.
From an search engine optimisation perspective, Bing is loved by
aggressive SEO’ers who use spammy links and heavy on site
manipulation to rank well.
The consequence is a poor search index which typically only
naive users will want to use. As a result, Bing will have to step
up it’s search game and will probably end up ranking on ‘signals’
similar to Google’s. What may end up meaning what's good for Bing
could be good for Google.
However, it is unlikely the Bing algorithm will change
dramatically in the next 18 months, so you can go ahead and rank on
Bing but destroy your Google rankings. Or you can have a
partitioned approach, ranking one site on Google and another on
Bing, but ROI on this approach is questionable.
If reality does not match hype then why so much noise about this
deal? In the US, Yahoo and Bing collectively have 21% of the search
market. By combining resources they hope to slow down Google’s
steady march to total domination.
The catch is that ‘BingHoo’ is no where near such a ‘popularity
tipping point’ in the UK and may never be so. For UK search
marketers I believe that means its business as usual with
Google.
Nick Garner is an SEO and Social Media manager for Betfair
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Other news and opinions on this story:
Yahoo could pull the plug on its search deal with Microsoft
Opinion: Yahoo and Microsoft still searching for Google's
crown