Will advertisers be affected by the switch to Bing?

If you’ve run Google AdWords campaigns before you may have been confused to see AOL as a source of traffic. Confused as to how users found your ads through AOL?

In previous years Google powered search and ad results for AOL, which is why you may have generated leads from the search partner. Expect your campaign results to shift for better or for worse, as AOL pulls its traffic.

In an official announcement from Bing Ads, AOL will partner with Bing for the next 10 years, with AOL serving Bing search and ad results to its users.

For those who advertise on Bing, this new traffic could mean a shift in performance. There’s no way to predict if the new traffic will increase or decrease your campaign metrics, so it’s important now m

ore than ever to check in on the health of your campaigns.

Honoring your settings

Bing Ads promises to honor your previous settings, with the addition of traffic from AOL. There’s no need to go in and make an update to your settings, unless you want to adjust ad distribution.

Under ad distribution settings, AOL will now be an option along with Bing and Yahoo. All search networks will be the default setting. You can now adjust network distribution at the ad group level as well. Unfortunately there is no option for excluding a search network from ad distribution. You could receive traffic from any of the three properties while advertising with Bing. This was the case in AdWords when the two were partners.

You can exclude traffic from syndicated search partners

As this new partnership goes live you’ll also receive traffic from AOL’s syndicated search partners. To view these partners look within your website URL publisher report. The URLs driving traffic on behalf of AOL will not be consolidated with those owned and operated under Bing and Yahoo. If you do not wish to receive traffic from these syndicated partners you can select “Only Bing AOL and Yahoo! Websites” from your network distribution settings.

You can further optimize your publisher results by utilizing exclusion lists. Add publishers who don’t convert to the exclusion list to prevent your ads from showing.

Reporting

To gauge performance you can monitor trends using the “Network column” in the Bing dashboard. AOL search is a recently added value that will help you generate reports on AOL network performance.

How will the switch effect your marketing efforts? How will you optimize this new source of traffic? Share your excitement or concerns by giving your opinion in the comment section below.