Yahoo! Search Marketing joining forces with Microsoft AdCenter sounds like a good idea for Microsoft in theory, but will it work? Microsoft would benefit from boosting its market share of search, and Yahoo’s dominant position in the display ads market will be a major asset to the company if the deal goes ahead. But it would be interesting to see if two relatively ineffective ad serving platforms can join forces to produce something that works the way that paid search advertisers want it to.

Don’t get me wrong, both systems have nice features, such as AdCenter’s radio buttons that allow search marketers to select whether a keyword is broad, phrase or exact match (why hasn’t Google bothered to do this yet?). With Panama, Yahoo! has also moved light years ahead of its previous cumbersome ad serving platform.

However, both struggle to provide a platform that works the way advertisers need it to. Yahoo! also has some client service issues that need to be overcome. How many times have UK advertisers allocated a share of search marketing budget to Yahoo!, only to find that issues that should have been easily overcome by Yahoo!’s client services meant that much of the budget was reallocated to Google?

Meanwhile, AdCenter’s client services are actually pretty impressive, with their quick launch team always very helpful. But their ad serving technology very often just seems not to function. In numerous instances, frequently searched for keywords that have significant budget allocated and high average ad positions according to data displayed in AdCenter, simply fail to trigger ads or register impressions.

Will bringing two organizations together that haven’t got paid search right yet somehow help to make it work? Search marketers could be excused for being sceptical of this. With all their technological expertise, you would expect Microsoft to have produced something better by now. Why not get the ad serving platform right before looking to expand?

Header image: Gnal on Flickr

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