Bing has just announced their latest advance in the search engine marketplace. Bing now powers AOL’s web, mobile, and tablet search. This announcement was alluded to in June of 2015, when Google lost its partnership with AOL and Bing announced a long-term partnership. Now that the transition is official. This move gives Bing additional, global reach with paid search ads as well as organic search results.
How Does This Impact Advertisers?
Overall, the noticeable technical changes for advertisers will be minimal. As you can see in Bing’s follow-up announcement, the majority of the changes will be additions of “AOL” to various settings within each account. For example, in the Advanced Settings of a campaign, “AOL” is added to each of the “Search Network” options. Advertisers won’t have to make any changes to current Ad Distribution settings.
Similar to the Campaign settings page, “AOL search” will also be added to the following areas of your Bing accounts:
- Network column in reports
- Top vs. Other Column in reports
- Network Distribution options in the Bing Editor
- Bing Ads Keyword Planner network targeting
- Bing Ads Campaign Planner search network distribution
Of course, the words “AOL” are not simply text changes within account settings. The addition of AOL search users to Bing’s networks increases advertisers’ reach. However, only time will tell if the added reach actually increases overall success for advertisers.
How Will The Search Industry Be Impacted?
According to comScore’s November 2015 U.S Desktop Search Engine Rankings, Bing holds position 2 in the market, with Yahoo in position 3 and AOL trailing behind in position 5. While Bing does power searches for Yahoo, their contract loosened in 2015, allowing Google to swoop in and grab some of Yahoo’s search query share. In addition, AOL’s position 5 in the market only accounts for about 1% of the market share. So it would be misleading to say that Bing has made massive gains in the search marketplace in the past year, but the AOL partnership is a good step in the right direction.
Do you think this new partnership will create significant gains for Bing advertisers?
