In a move that would shake up the Mobile advertising world, BusinessWeek announced that Apple and Microsoft have been discussing a deal that would make Bing the iPhone’s default search engine. Currently, that honor is held by Google, which is run by mobile advertising company AdMob, Google’s recent $750 million dollar acquisition. Although users would still be allowed to switch their default back to Google, the coveted “default search engine”, would certainly result in a gain in market share.
In 2009, Google accounted for almost 88 billion searches or 67% of the global search market. Bing registered just 4.1 billion, but did grow 70% over Microsoft’s previous year with Live. Microsoft has a long way to go before it catches Google in the search market, but an iPhone move to Bing would be a large step in the engine’s uphill battle.
The big news all over search land is the just-inked deal between Microsoft and Yahoo to combine search delivery and ad-selling forces in order to combat Google.
The deal makes sense for all parties. Yahoo gets better search technology by powering their web search properties with the Bing algorithms, and Microsoft taps into a network that is many multiples larger than its own.
From our point of view this is mostly good news. Better, more relevant search results will make the Yahoo/MSN ad network that much more valuable, and hopefully provide a better qualified audience, especially in markets like high tech, where the valuable portion of the audience has tended to use Google. More volume in the network also means we can perform faster performance assessment and testing, and more rapid optimization.
The only worrisome note is the talk of centralizing ad sales on the Microsoft AdCenter platform. AdCenter has always been much more difficult to manage than AdWords, or Yahoo’s Panama platform, however API-driven tools may largely make these differences moot for agencies (aside from their development teams). Should AdCenter be the ad management platform of choice, expect to see small and local advertisers alienated by any migration away from the Panama platform. We would strongly suggest that Yahoo/Microsoft integrate Panama as the ad management platform of choice for the combined network.
With an estimated 24 months of integration to execute this almost-a-merger, we don’t see any rapid changes in daily management, but the road ahead will be interesting as Yahoo and Microsoft address the thorny details implicit in this deal.
Microsoft has recently released a plugin tool for Excel 2007 that might rival all available engine keyword tools. It is called AdIntelligence and it provides a lot of interesting data.
The two features I find the most promising are the monthly traffic tool, which takes keywords you input and returns historical search data from the Microsoft search engine Live.com. The tests I have done show huge variations in month to month traffic, which is very interesting, if the reported numbers are accurate.
Here’s an example of a few car insurance keywords with a year of historic data, as well as 3 months of predicted performance. (Click the image to see the full version.)
This level of transparency and the amount of data provided directly by a search engine blows apps like the old Overture keyword tool out of the water. The spikes in data are curious, though. Take for example “buy car insurance online” which vaulted from 9,096 queries in May to 105,523 in July. This would not be as suspicious to me if the same fluctuations were seen in other related keywords, but that’s not the case in this instance. It makes it hard to chalk such a fluctuation up to seasonal performance changes. Data integrity remains a question. Either way, this feature is very promising (the tool is still in beta) and should help anyone at least get an overall idea of the traffic behind their potential keywords.
The other interesting feature is a monetization breakdown, which takes a list of keywords you provide and returns the impressions, clicks, average position, CTR, and CPC for all advertisers on AdCenter. I was fairly surprised to see so much information freely provided by Microsoft, considering how closely guarded the engines traditionally keep this information.
Here are some of the same car insurance keywords from the last example:
According to this data, there were 971 clicks on the exact keyword “car insurance quotes” in the last month, at an average CPC of $15.00, all the advertisers bidding on this keyword averaged a 3.05% CTR.
Other features of AdIntelligence not covered here are a Demographic and Geographic breakdown of keywords, as well as several keyword research tools, that take either a URL or original keyword and return a list of similar keywords. There is also a tool that will return keywords that advertisers are bidding on related to your original keyword.
AdIntelligence is a plugin for Excel 2007, you can download the beta here. There is also a 60 day demo of Excel 2007 available at the link if you don’t have it. I highly recommend trying out the tool, and I hope Microsoft continues to add new features.
