Efficiency Tips for Adobe AdLens Search Advertisers on the Yahoo! Bing Network

The Team

If you're using the new Landing Page by Match Type framework, here's how to help make sure you're not missing potential performance gains

Editor's note: This is another in a series of posts by members of the

Yahoo!-Bing Preferred Partner Program, a group of leading SEM technology experts who bring innovative search campaign management platforms and services to our advertisers. Adobe is one of those partners, and in this post, Kiyoshi Ihara, Product Manager of Search, Adobe AdLens (left), and Kohki Yamaguchi, Business Analyst, Media and Advertising Solutions (right), share tips on how Adobe AdLens customers can achieve new levels of efficiency using the new Landing Page by Match Type framework.

Search marketers have lots of great tools at their disposal, and Adobe® AdLens™ is one of them. It's the first unified ad management system designed to help advertisers optimize campaigns across search, display, and social media channels.

If you're currently advertising on the Yahoo! Bing Network, you probably know about the valuable new functionality that's rolling out globally right now---Landing Page by Match Type, which completed its transition into the U.S. market in October. If you're not familiar with the framework, it's designed to allow unique match type level destination URLs, and thus match type level tracking, at click time. We believe it's the missing piece that advertisers need to effectively link their match type investments with their corresponding performance.

As we at Adobe tracked the roll out, we heard that many advertisers and third-party tool providers are allowing their accounts to transition "as is" without taking advantage of the new functionality. If you're merely ensuring that your ads are continuing to serve, you could be leaving a lot of performance on the table.

By not taking advantage of the new framework's features, two common inefficiencies can occur:

  • The continued over-reliance on the broad match type as opposed to exact or phrase

  • Maintaining the same bid post-migration for all match types of a keyword

The good news is, addressing these issues with Bing Ad accounts that have transitioned to the Landing Page by Match Type framework can lead to immediate gains in efficiency.

What kind of benefits are we talking about? To assess the types of gains advertisers can expect to see when taking full advantage of the updated functionality, we analyzed the performance of Yahoo! Bing Network search campaigns on more than four billion impressions across 68 U.S. advertisers using the Adobe AdLens platform.

ROI trends were examined over three two-week increments (labeled post periods in the chart below) following the transition and compared to the ROI seen during the two-week period immediately prior to transition (pre-period).

We saw a dramatic increase in ROI week over week, with a median gain of 11.1% in weeks 5-6 over pre-transition performance. We compared this to a control group of campaigns for the same set of advertisers, on another search network with capabilities similar to landing page by match type. The control group saw only a 0.4% lift, indicating that the lift as seen on the Yahoo! Bing Network is due to the new framework, not seasonality or market trends.

Even for the same keyword phrase, efficiency can differ greatly between match types. By expanding the keyword set to include more exact and phrase match, and bidding on each match type separately according to their respective performance, it becomes possible to simultaneously achieve higher conversion rate and lower average CPC.

We saw this trend in our data where CPCs for the Yahoo! Bing Network campaigns dropped by almost 5% over the six-week period following transition. This indicates that approximately half of the total lift seen was due to greater CPC efficiency, while the other half can be attributed to gains in conversion rate and revenue per click.

The lift numbers shown in the chart above were attained using Adobe AdLens algorithmic portfolio optimization---but all advertisers, including those not using a robust bidding platform, have the potential to realize efficiency gains within the new framework.

Moving beyond the status-quo may require some work, but leveraging the full capabilities provided by the new Landing Page by Match Type framework is proving to be well worth the effort.