Today, Microsoft announced that the transition is now complete in these countries.

“Yahoo! Search is really an important part of our business and we have invested a lot of time to make the transition as efficient and as seamless as possible for our advertisers and publishers” sid Jon Myers, Director, Account Management UK and Ireland “Now we can focus on delivering compelling content for our users and customers to build relevant online experiences.

“We’re delighted to successfully reach this important milestone in the UK, France and Ireland,” said Microsoft’s Mark Richardson. “As a result of this transition we believe Bing users will see more useful advertising while presenting advertisers with an increasingly compelling alternative in search advertising. We look forward to this rolling out across the next set of European markets.”

Microsoft has indicated that Germany, Austria and Switzerland would be the focal points for the Search Alliance, following the UK, Ireland and France. The transition on the paid search side has already been completed in North America and India. For organic search, it’s already been completed globally.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it has rebranded its ads for SMBs as “Bing, powered by Bing and Yahoo! Search.”

“By aligning with the Bing brand, SMBs will better understand that they are buying traffic on Bing and Yahoo! search,” a spokesperson for Microsoft tells WebProNews. “Many of our advertisers find us through the Bing homepage, where they click on ‘Advertise here.’ This shift helps those customers follow a more intuitive path to what they are looking for.”

The change is effective today.

“With one ad buy through Microsoft Advertising adCenter, search advertisers are able to reach 158 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites), providing a sizable volume of 5.6 billion monthly searches and a 29% search share, which is nearly one-third of all queries in the US,” says Microsoft’s GM of SMB Advertising, Matt Lydon, citing comScore data.

“Our audience is significant in size and in online purchase activity,” he adds. “The unique searchers on Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites) are likely to spend 26% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 9% more than Google searchers in the U.S.”

He also notes that advertisers can reach 49 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo, that don’t use Google in the US.

The “search alliance” between Microsoft and Yahoo continues to roll on. Last month, it finalized in the UK, Ireland and France.

The ad transition officially begins on April 18.

“Next week, we begin to shift ad serving for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft Advertising adCenter,” says Microsoft’s Cedric Chambraz. “This means that adCenter ads will gradually be displayed on Yahoo! Search result pages in the UK, France and Ireland. This process will begin as early as the 18th of April and is expected to conclude during the last week of the month when 100% of the Yahoo! traffic will be made available in adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts will go in read-only mode.”

“As Yahoo! ad serving moves to adCenter, and your clicks and impressions in that account begin to increase, you’ll see a corresponding decrease in clicks and impressions in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account,” he adds. “It is thus important to continue managing your campaigns across both platforms throughout this transition phase, in order to avoid missing out on any potential clicks. To help you prepare, I wanted to share the following guidance to assist you through this transition.”

There’s a “transition portal” in the adCenter tab when you sign into your Yahoo account, which you can use to complete the transition, which the companies are urging you to do sooner rather than later, if you’re in one of these countries.

The companies also suggest increasing your adCenter budget (go figure) to prepare for increased traffic, once Yahoo search traffic starts to flood adCenter.

According to Microsoft, Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be getting the search alliance treatment in the coming months.

The changes are only coming to the U.S. and Canada for now, however. Microsoft is removing about 10,000 cities from adCenter targeting, starting in mid to late May.

“Because these cities have seen no measurable traffic, this change will have no negative impact on the performance of your campaigns,” says Microsoft’s Peter Yang. “If you are targeting a city that will be removed, we recommend that you update your settings to target a city supported by adCenter to gain more traffic.”

Microsoft provides a downloadable spreadsheet, where you can see all of the locations that are going away, and their corresponding locations that you should be targeting. Find the ones you need to be targeting, then simply go into adCenter and replace the non-supported ones with the corresponding supported ones.

Microsoft will pause any campaigns or ad groups that only target cities that are being removed. The default target will be set to worldwide. In other words, this probably isn’t something you want to ignore. If some supported cities are sprinkled in, those cities will still be targeted. If you’re using the API to call non-supported cities, an error message will appear.

If you think that losing some of these cities will hurt your campaign, Microsoft aims to convince you otherwise. The company says you are likely to see an increase in impressions (though you probably know your campaign better than anyone, and it might depend on your reasons for targeting select cities).

Changes include:

• Ease of navigation in Web UI and Desktop: Menu redesign to allow for easy discovery of features
• Browser Compatibility: adCenter support for Chrome and Safari
• Improving Desktop Performance: Faster and more reliable experience in managing bulk tasks
• Historical and Aggregated Quality Score: Improves campaign performance by having greater visibility into quality scores

In addition to these, they have several features currently in testing with select advertisers:

• URL by Match Type: Beginning this week, we are introducing new functionality that will provide more precise control over advertiser campaigns. In addition to the ability to assign unique destination URLs for each keyword match type within the same ad group, advertisers may also assign unique parameters. The team is releasing this feature in waves beginning this week continuing through the end of October. Advertisers will receive a notification email at least one week before this feature is enabled for their account.
• Improved Location Targeting: Advertisers may now reach more relevant users in targeted locations with fewer steps. Also, advertisers can now leverage new advanced location options to target users by physical location or by their physical location and intent.
• Broad Match Modifier: A targeting feature that lets advertisers create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match, and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords help advertisers get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if they mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

According to the company, advertisers should expect these features to be generally available soon. On top of all of this, the company is working to launch more interactive ad formats for mobile.

Last week, Microsoft announced an update to how it handles negative keywords.

adCenter, of course provides the paid search ads behind not only Bing, but Yahoo. Tthe adCenter portion of the companies’ search alliance is still rolling out to more countries. Last month, Microsoft announced the migration of Yahoo Search Marketing accounts in the UK, Ireland and France. IT has already been complete in the U.S. and Canada (though the organic search part is already worldwide).

In a recent announcement, Yahoo declared that Yahoo/Bing clicks are 14% more valuable than Google clicks, while also having 9% more ROI. This was based on data from Efficient Frontier (Global Q4 2011 Digital Marketing Performance Report).

Today, that update is live.

“If you have negative keywords applied at both the campaign and ad group levels you may experience lower traffic volume, as the negative keywords you assigned at the campaign level will now be applied in conjunction with the ad group level negatives.,” Microsoft says in a blog post. “It is highly recommended if you closely review your campaign-level negatives if you have negative keywords uploaded at both the campaign and ad group levels to make sure you aren’t blocking wanted traffic at the ad group level. There is no change to the 10k negative keyword limits at either the campaign or ad group level.”

The company provides the following comparison for how negative keywords used to work, with how they work now. I’m not sure whey they went with such a low quality image, but that’s what they posted, so sorry.

The company says you should establish negative keywords in each hierarchy based on category in each hierarchy. You should also apply the common negative keywords at the campaign level, Microsoft says, so they could be shared across the lower ad group. Also, keep monitoring the Negative Conflicts Report.

Earlier this week, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL started offering each others’ display inventory.

The organic transition has already happened worldwide, and the ad platform transition is still in the process. In fact, the companies just announced that it’s rolling out in the UK, Ireland and France.

In a post on Yahoo’s Advertising Solutions blog, Yahoo is pointing to four recent studies from Efficient Frontier, Marin Software, Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG) and Ignition One, and pulling out some points made in these about the momentum of the search alliance’s paid side:

• “On a year over year basis, our customers realized a 44% higher click volume combined [on Yahoo! Search and Bing]” — Marin U.S. Online Advertising Report, October — December 2011
• “Yahoo! Search and Bing clicks are 14% more valuable than Google, while also having 9% more ROI than Google” — Efficient Frontier, Global Q4 2011 Digital Marketing Performance Report
• “ROAS on Yahoo! Search and Bing was up 9.8% Y/Y in Q4…” — RKG Digital Marketing Report, Q4 2011
• “Yahoo! Search and Bing spend growth topped Google in the last two months of the year” — Ignition One Global Online Advertising Report, Q4 2011

According to Microsoft, the transition should be complete in the previously mentioned European countries by the end of April.

“Over the last two weeks, adCenter has released its latest round of pre-holiday features, all delivering on advertisers’ wish lists of improving campaign performance, increasing volume, and simplifying processes to help save time,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.

Features include a redesigned web user interface, an upgrade to the adCenter Desktop, and the release of several performance reporting tools.

Microsoft outlines each of these.

The interface:

• Simplified Campaign Set Up for creating campaigns and ad groups, and a sleek, new single-page view with real-time previews and keyword suggestion, enabling quicker campaign deployment.
• Improvements to Navigation & Discovery to help advertisers manage across their entire account by viewing and editing keywords and ads across multiple campaigns and ad-groups at once.
• Improvements to Campaign Reporting with new multi-metric trend charts, delivery status notification features and positional bid estimates.
• Improvements to Editing with in-line editing, in-line bid editing, and best position estimations in the keywords grid.

The desktop:

• New Welcome Screen takes advertisers on an end-to-end tour of the Desktop tool to help them get set up and started quickly.
• An expanded Import Campaigns feature to allow advertisers to easily and directly import their Google AdWords campaign data into the Desktop.
• Clipboard support to enable basic copy and paste functionality so that advertisers can quickly and easily copy data and move it to, from, and within Desktop.
• Bulk bid suggestions to offer more than 1,000 keywords and let advertisers easily apply changes in order to increase traffic.
• Simplified Targeting with a default set to the advertisers’ account location, determined by the language listed in their Desktop settings.

Tools:

• New, improved Opportunities Tab that includes bid suggestions for exact/broad match and in-line editing. With this new feature advertisers can easily address underperforming bids to target more volume.
• New Share of Voice feature that quantifies missed impressions in Account, Campaign, and Ad Group performance reports, and helps prioritize optimizations more effectively.
• Improved historical and aggregated Quality Score data to allow advertisers to view aggregated quality score by summary or by time frame, including hour, day, week or month.
• An upgrade to Change History reports so advertisers can view targeting changes and gain better insights into campaign performance related to those changes.

For those of you who aren’t advertising with adCenter, remember that these things apply to Bing and Yahoo advertisers.

“These new mobile local ad offerings build off of the momentum generated from the recent Bing Business Portal and Bing Mobile Deals announcements,” says Microsoft’s Dennis Glavin.

The Radius Targeting will let advertisers target a specific segment within a 5-100 mile radius of the address displayed in the ad copy.

The new attributes let advertisers define certain things in their ad, such as the merchant’s address or phone number. “Those attributes will be served to local queries and within advertisements, both on the PC and mobile,” says Glavin. “Local Ad Attributes will begin rolling out in adCenter in the second half of the calendar year, depending upon publisher and mobile device.”

“Bing Vision taps into the idea that once a customer is inside a store, the brand’s goal is to get them to ‘marry’ its product,” he says. “Bing Vision utilizes the camera on a customer’s smartphone to provide the customer with additional product information, reviews and prices. The system is easy: all a customer has to do is take a photo of the product and Bing Vision will detect the text, QR Scanner or MS Tag, returning the product results – helping the customer further engage and hopefully purchase the product.”

As far as scannable codes go, WebProNews recently spoke with Mike Wehrs, former Chief of the Mobile Marketing Association (and a Microsoft Vet), who now runs ScanBuy. He brought up some good point about using open formats vs. proprietary formats (like Microsoft’s Tag) Watch the interview:

Bing Vision is already available on the Bing iPhone app, and the company says it will be available on other platforms later this year.

"Given what a busy time of year this is for everyone, both personally and professionally, you may have the feeling that there’s something you’re supposed to do, but haven’t yet. Did you forget something?" asks Microsoft’s Ricky Poole. 

"With all of the holiday hustle and bustle, I wanted to take a minute to remind any of you in the US and Canada who may still have campaigns in Yahoo! Search Marketing that the transition tool will be closing on January 5, 2011," he adds. "If you have not yet transitioned your PPC accounts from Yahoo! to adCenter, after January 5th you will need to do so manually through exporting and importing your campaigns."

Yahoo and Microsoft completed the search transition in the U.S. and Canada in October. Microsoft even extended its adCenter support hours during the transition. 

If you still have questions about the transition, you should be able to find your answers here.