Yahoo & Microsoft merger - how does it affect PPC?

It has been widely reported in the industry news over the last few days that Yahoo and Microsoft have announced a merger. For those of you who have miraculously escaped this news, the basis is that Yahoo will be adopting Microsoft's Bing search engine technology and the PPC marketing will be powered by Microsoft's Bing AdCenter platform. Microsoft has issued an official press release should you want to read more information.

But how will this affect your PPC strategy?

The main obvious impact for PPC campaigns will be the fact that advertisers will soon have two decent sized platforms from which to advertise. Until now, Google Adwords has always been the major player, holding the majority share of the market, and Yahoo and Microsoft have only had minimal shares individually.

This inevitably in the past has caused advertisers to allocate their main focus and budgets to Google, and either dismiss the other search engines entirely or only allocate comparably smaller budgets due to their lower market share and opportunity to generate conversions.

The merger of Yahoo and Bing will allow PPC advertisers to test a larger, combined audience of the two search engines in the hope that this will provide a better chance of conversion due to a higher potential user base.  I am keen to test whether conversion rates will actually improve because it will very according to each client and their target audience.

The change is expected to take place in early 2010 and I am excited to see how this is going to make an impact on search. According to Comscore (June 2009) Google still retains the major market share of 65% and following the merger the combined market share for Bing is expected to be 28%. It's clear that there is still a long way to go before Bing can really make a dent in Google's reign of the search industry.