In the last week, we got 3 to 4 messages from our clients with a very similar concern – “Can you please explain why the impressions have been going down on a weekly basis for the YAHOO / Bing campaign?”. Very rarely we get to hear from our clients regarding the impressions and as most of you would agree that a major point of concern is either the conversion / CTR or CPC.
So, it took some new members of our PPC team by surprise – but our clients had reasons to be concerned with some of the impressions drastically falling from 7000 to 3000. The remarkable part of the equation was that the CTR was unchanged in majority of this cases.
Here are the before and after snapshots of one of the campaigns….
BEFORE:
AFTER:
After a few rounds of analysis, it was discovered that the primary reason for the low impressions in both Yahoo & adCenter is the ‘Ad Serving Shift‘ because of the Yahoo & adCenter Merger. During this transition phase, the Paid Search results on the Yahoo domain is going to be replaced by the ADCenter results. As of last week, 30% of Yahoo’s Paid advertisement was replaced with adCenter’s advertisements. Gradually, all the paid search results of Yahoo will be replaced by the AdCenter’s ADs – until Bing is ready to administer the PPC campaign for both YAHOO and MSN.
An explanation for this YAHOO / BING transition was sent out to our clients in order to make the necessary diversion of budget during the transition period.
A few simple actions will take care of this transition phase hiccups for a YAHOO / BING PPC campaign….
(1) Transition of all yahoo campaigns to Bing using transition button in yahoo dashboard.
(2) Once the transition is done, you need to tweak the AD copies as in yahoo the heading is 40 character long while in Bing it is 25 character long. For all our campaigns, we had to rewrite the heading titles to adjust the length.
(3) Readjust all the keyword match types – YAHOO and Bing have different keyword match types
(4) Finally, the most important part – Migrate all the YAHOO budget towards the Bing Campaign until the transition is complete..
The above actions would ensure that your impressions are within an acceptable range.
