As you may know, the Yahoo and Microsoft advertising transition is complete. Yahoo and Microsoft paid search advertisers must use adCenter to manage their campaigns. But how smooth has the transition been for advertisers? 

WebProNews took a few moments to talk about the transition with PPC expert Christine Churchill of Key Relevance at PubCon in Las Vegas. "One of the things that we’ve done to help clients move and transition over to the adCenter…because a lot of them start with Google, and they get their sites optimized and their campaigns optimized in Google because there’s some great tools and the user interface is pretty well established," she says.  

"adCenter is a much newer system even though it’s been out for several years, it still has a few little glitches," she continues. "And one thing that you can do if you’re a business owner, and you’re running your own account…there’s a nice litte free downloadable tool that Google has – the AdWords Editor – something you can do is download your campaigns – your account – into the AdWords Editor and then export it into a spreadsheet and do some tweaking. It’s not a straight transfer into the adCenter, but you can use that as a transition tool. It really helps a lot of businesses."

"Some of the areas you’re going to have to transition and tweak is your negative keywords, your geo-targeting, and things like that, so it’s not perfect, but it gets the bulk of the transition done for you, so you don’t have to do it all – all that GUI interface of typing things in, which is an absolute nightmare, [and] very repetitive process, so that will save people a lot of time," adds Churchill. 

When asked if it seems like advertisers seem to prefer the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft to the separate entities, she says, "I think it varies on the advertiser. I think it’s still very new, so I think anything they say right now…give it a few months. Let some of the initial bugs work out and meanwhile keep advertising on Google, but don’t give up on adCenter. I think that it’ll prove in the long term to be a beneficial thing, because there’s another opportunity [to] get in front of potential customers, so I see it as a good thing long term." 

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WebProNews also spoke with David Roth, Yahoo’s own director of search marketing, who obviously offers a slightly different perspective on the transition, given that he not only works for Yahoo, but does paid search marketing for the company himself. 

"Now, for me, I’ve got kind of an unusual view on this because I am not only an advertiser, but Yahoo’s also a publisher, so we transitioned all of our advertising like everybody did," said Roth. "So now we’re using adCenter to manage our Yahoo and our Bing buy, but we also monetize search results all over Yahoo, and so we transitioned in two different ways. So for me it was really interesting to see how metrics shift, you know, as the market place shifts, and now all the work that we have to do to try to re-optimize our campaigns and adjust to how the new ecosystem works, as opposed to the old one."

"The thing that I noticed mostly, and [these are] kind of some basic principles or best practices, that one of the things I thought that we as advertisers could’ve done better, was to be more aggressive with what we were doing on adCenter, because we do want to make sure that all that traffic is shifting over there, and I think that when we went into it, we thought, ‘well, we’ll start with our best keywords. We’ll start with our top performers,’ but what we realized very quickly was that we really needed to move everything over there, and we needed to be as aggressive as possible in growing out our adCenter campaigns and keywords and ad groups, because we needed that in order to try to preserve the level of quantity and quality of traffic that we were getting previously," said Roth.

Yahoo and Microsoft have a detailed transition checklist for advertisers, which can be found here. 

Are you an advertiser? Tell us how the transition has worked out for you.