Microsoft’s Bing technologies now power 100 percent of paid searches on Yahoo sites in the U.S. and Canada, the two companies said Wednesday. The switchover came right on schedule, and in time for holiday sales.
"This marks the completion of the transition of advertisers' Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) Search Marketing accounts to AdCenter," said a post on the Yahoo Advertising Blog.
That means that advertisers can manage their ad campaigns from one client account.
"Advertisers will operate a single account in AdCenter to reach Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo's audience of 163 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million searchers in Canada," David Pann, general manager for the Search Network at Microsoft, said in a post on the AdCenter Blog.
The two companies have been working since last spring to transition Microsoft's Bing search technologies over to support Yahoo's sites and to handle much of Yahoo's search advertising -- for a cut of the proceeds.
The ten-year deal had a tough birth. Microsoft pursued Yahoo initially as a hostile takeover target in 2008. However, Yahoo strenuously resisted, and eventually Microsoft dropped its bid.
A year later, in July 2009, the two companies struck a deal for Microsoft to provide search engine technologies and search advertising infrastructure to Yahoo's various sites in return for some of the advertising revenues.
The deal got the nod from federal regulators in February.
In mid-August, Yahoo and Microsoft announced they had begun transitioning Yahoo's searches to Microsoft's Bing search infrastructure. A week later the companies confirmed that the integration of the back-end technology was already complete.
By early September, the project had moved forward to the point that Yahoo advertisers could begin transitioning their paid search campaigns over to Microsoft's AdCenter. The plan was to have the work done by the end of October, and now that phase of the project has been completed.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
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