Microsoft Yahoo Partnership

Regarding the Microsoft Yahoo Merge Deal, there are important details you need to be aware of when managing your Paid Search campaigns post-integration.

Retailers need to prepare for the Microsoft/Yahoo Partnership that will most likely take effect in Q2/Q3 2010.

Make sure you have an adCenter account!

Common practice for Small to Medium Businesses is to first launch Campaigns on Google and once performance is stable, move the campaigns over to Yahoo and Bing. So with that, there are definitely a large number of Paid Search advertisers out there that do not even have a MSN/Bing adCenter account. I would also suggest doing some coupon searches as Microsoft usually runs promotions for $50-$200 in free clicks for new accounts.
Click here to sign up.

Familiarize yourself with adCenter and adCenter Editor.

Managing Bing campaigns is more challenging and more manual than on Yahoo; take some time over the next few months familiarizing yourself with the adCenter Interface. MSN also handles a few things differently than Google: Keyword Insertion, Automatic Launch on all Match Types, No Daily Budgets, etc. so you will need to learn how to manage these idiosyncrasies. Also download MSN's adCenter Editor. While not as robust as Adwords Editor,
Microsoft's adCenter editor is a FREE and very useful tool that makes managing MSN campaigns much easier. Another way to improve your workflow would be to look at strong 3rd party platforms that enable seamless Campaign/Keyword implementation across both Engines.

Stay abreast of developments

When the integration is completed (mid 2010), make sure you understand exactly how the 2 platforms are going to appear in adCenter. Our data shows that MSN has a much better ROI than Yahoo, so you should make every effort to manage these two properties separately. If you can prevent it, you do not want to have MSN subsidize your Yahoo performance.