In response to transitions under the renegotiated search deal, Bing Ads will release weekly updates on the percentage of Yahoo click volume it’s delivering.
Bing Ads has released new data showing the weekly trending of Yahoo search ad click volume that’s served through Bing Ads. The numbers go back to the beginning of May when the newly renegotiated search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo took effect.
It seems clear from the blog post that Bing Ads is releasing the stats — which will be updated weekly here on the Bing Ads site — in an effort to quash rumors about the state of search ad delivery rates on Yahoo. From the announcement (Note, this quote reflects an update to the original post.):
“We know how important it is for our customers to understand changes in Bing Ads volume to plan their search spend. As a result, we have developed the chart below, which contains recent data measuring the weekly Yahoo Bing Network (YBN) click volume being served through Bing Ads (in the U.S.) since May 1st. Bing Ads continues to deliver a consistent set of ad clicks, averaging 99% of YBN’s April baseline click volume across all devices.”
Under the old deal, Bing Ads delivered all desktop search ads on Yahoo properties. Mobile was left up for grabs. Yahoo began making inroads into delivering it’s own mobile ads through Yahoo Gemini last year. Under the new terms of the deal, Yahoo can serve up to 49 percent of desktop search traffic ads from its own Gemini system or another partner (like Google).
Each company is also now handling its own ad sales, whereas in the past Yahoo handled high-spend accounts for both companies. Advertisers getting different messages from different sales team would appear to be the motivation for releasing this data.
The following chart, released Thursday, represents volume of click share across all devices:
For now it appears things are status quo. As Yahoo ramps up its own search ad delivery efforts, we should see these numbers start dipping, but to what extent and how rapidly the shift in traffic mix will happen remains to be seen. In Q4 of last year, RKG Merkle reported seeing Yahoo Gemini account for a greater share of Bing and Yahoo mobile traffic among its clients, but other than that little outside data has been published on click share to date.
