Yahoo/Bing fightback with search alliance

Scheduled for Q1/Q2 2011, Yahoo! and Microsoft will launch the result of their Search Alliance in the UK. In short, both companies will continue to operate as separate search brands with differentiated consumer search experiences, but will deploy the same back-end technologies for organic search results and paid search. Both Yahoo! Search and Bing will be powered by Microsoft platforms.

Marketers should be alive to this change, as it could be the start of a fightback against Google’s dominance of UK search.

To their credit, both Yahoo! and Bing are working hard on migrating campaigns from the previous platforms, but the most interesting impact will be on the number of people which will now be reachable through this network.

The alliance launched in the US, where The alliance’s share of impressions and click-throughs rose 4% and 2%. Bing and Yahoo! already have a larger footprint in the US than they do in the UK, so it will be interesting to see what impact they have on Google, which is a more dominant player in the UK. Looking across our clients, we continuously see that Google delvers over 95% of a site’s organic search traffic, particularly for large publishers.

So what do search marketers need to think about?

As they come together, we’re expecting the inventory they offer to rise as the associated marketing spend that will come with the launch will push many searchers to try out the platforms. In addition, the integration of Bing into Facebook should introduce many others to the platform. If the traffic can reach a significant level, then online marketers should reconsider these search engines in their organic and PPC strategies. The immediate benefit that comes from two search engines being manageable from one tool kit will save time, but if the audience does not switch to this platform, or if you are marketing smaller/more niche products then this audience may simply not be big enough to justify the effort.

For those already marketing through Bing and Yahoo!, there is also the fear that combining search inventory will push the cost per click up on campaigns run on both networks but this should be negligible as much is being done to manage the transition.

Microsoft has the best ad management tools in the market. Better insight, better targeting and better productivity should give you more time to find ways to squeeze more response from your campaigns. But these tools without the audience are simply nice to have. If they can lever the renewed interest and build audience then we may see the start of one of the greatest online fightbacks ever.

Watch the launch video here: