By: Madison Adams // Director of Paid Media
The New Microsoft and Verizon Media Partnership
Microsoft and Verizon Media have had a long-standing relationship that dates back nearly 10 years. They just recently announced they will be further extending their partnership, making Bing Ads the exclusive platform for search advertising across the AOL and Yahoo networks. This new partnership obviously affects anyone advertising on the Bing Ads platform and/or the Verizon (Oath) ad platform. This will take place after the transitions are complete at the end of March.
How Will It Affect Your Advertising?
One of the main results of this new Microsoft and Verizon Media partnership is that advertisers are expected to experience an increase in clicks of up to 15%, which in turn would result in an increase in spend. It is important to note this so that you can ensure your campaigns are not limited by budget. Especially if you plan on continuing to use the same budgets you were using before the transition.
Outside of the above expectation, which affects current users of both platforms, current users of the Oath platform are really affected the most and have the brunt of the work to do. This means essentially re-creating their campaigns in Bing Ads. The migration of search campaigns from Oath to Bing Ads will start on March 15 and complete on March 31. After the end of March, search campaigns will not be able to be managed on Oath.
Although Oath users have more work to do in this transition phase, this Microsoft and Verizon Media partnership allows advertisers to leverage the benefits of the Bing Ads platform such as, Microsoft AI and audience targeting across networks. Several of these Bing Ads features will be a significant step up for current Oath advertisers.
Current users of the Bing Ads platform don’t really have to do much preparation for this transition. However, this would be a perfect opportunity to go through their existing search strategy and make some updates and refreshes, getting ready for additional click traffic and inventory. As mentioned, all parties involved will have to keep a close eye on budgets with this increase in click traffic.
This arrangement will also affect native advertising inventory for both partners. The Oath Native Marketplace will gain exclusive access to Microsoft’s new inventory on MSN and the Microsoft Audience Network for native ads will get access to inventory on Verizon Media properties as well as these new MSN placements.
In Conclusion
All in all, advertisers currently running on both platforms are going to experience some perks in this new partnership. With that both will also have to closely monitor campaigns as the transition occurs with the unpredictable changes to traffic. Not only will overall network inventory increase with the partnership, but we may see an influx in additional advertisers launching programs in Bing after this announcement, which in turn could affect costs and traffic levels.
Microsoft and Verizon Media claim that they will continuously aim to bring more value and possibilities to their clients, so it sounds like there is a bright future ahead! At Pico, we are happy to help with any advertising questions you might have.
