Microsoft Advertising rebrands as Bing

During May, Microsoft announced that their Microsoft Advertising brand is to renamed as Bing to bring it in line with the main search engine brand. However, there remains inconsistency and confusion as the search advertising service merges with Yahoo.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have become the core market for search engines and social media advertising. Small businesses are a particularly important audience for Microsoft, given the strength of Google Adwords among smaller advertisers, and so Microsoft has rebranded its Microsoft Advertising brand as ‘Bing’, although the PPC service remains known as Microsoft adCenter, at least for the time being.

Microsoft are hoping this rebranding will boost sales by giving advertisers a clue that they are buying traffic on Microsoft’s search engine, and Microsoft also believe that making things easier to understand will lower some of the existing barriers. When customers now access Microsoft adCenter they will see a page that looks like Microsoft’s Bing search engine, thus making the experience for customers more intuitive path through the Microsoft search experience.

Microsoft has also recently completed the transition of the Yahoo Search Marketing service into the Microsoft adCenter system in the UK, but Australia remains one of the last countries still using the Yahoo PPC tool to buy paid ads on Yahoo and Bing / NineMSN.

The latest figures from Hitwise show that around 6% of search activity goes through Bing or Yahoo sites in Australia, compared to over 85% of searches through Google. This is in contrast to the US market, where Bing / Yahoo have a bigger share of search, with 20% of all activity compared to Google’s 67% share.

For more information about search marketing on Bing, please contact us.

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