In some cases you might not even need to do anything. If you already have a MSN adcenter account and have the same campaigns in both Msn and Yahoo, then there might not be much to do.   Yet if you dont have an ad center account, or dont have the same campaigns setup in both Yahoo and MSN, then you will need to do the transition and its pretty simple.

First you need to review the compatibility report and make edits. Then once you start the transition from within your Yahoo account, you will then login to your MSN adcenter account or create a new one. Then its just a matter of going through a series of screens that will pretty much guide you through adding the campaigns that you had in Yahoo into your MSN account.  Then you might need to fine tune them somewhat add tweak the bids, titles and descriptions of the ads.

You still need to manage your Yahoo ads though until sometime in late October. Once its complete, then you will just manage your campaigns from within MSN adcenter.

From Yahoo Blog —>
You’ll be ready for the expected October move of Yahoo! Search ad serving to adCenter

Last week, we completed the transition of the back-end technology for English-language Yahoo! organic search results in the U.S. and Canada. This week, advertisers can start transitioning their paid Yahoo! Search Marketing account, in anticipation of the Yahoo! ad serving transition which we expect to start mid-October. We encourage you to transition your account before the ad serving transition begins, so that you are ready to reach more than 159 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million searchers in Canada* on Yahoo! Search, Bing and our partners.

Start your account transition now
Beginning today, you may log in to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and initiate your transition to Microsoft Advertising adCenter. We’ve created a detailed Transition Checklist that you should review now, to help ensure that you’re prepared to make a smooth transition to adCenter, as well as a Feature Comparison Guide, to help you get familiar with adCenter’s features and capabilities.

There are three stages to completing your transition:

1) Prepare your account for transition to adCenter
When you log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account, you’ll automatically be taken to a new tab labeled “adCenter.” We recommend that you review your Compatibility Report, and fix incompatibilities between your current Yahoo! campaigns and the adCenter platform before starting the transition to adCenter.

2) Transition your account to adCenter
When you begin your transition, you’ll be able to create a new adCenter account, or indicate that you have an existing adCenter account that you want to continue to use. If you choose, you can use the transition tool to copy your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns over to adCenter. Please note that your campaigns will retain the same status (active or paused) as they have within your Yahoo! account, so you may start incurring click charges for Bing traffic right away.

3) Continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account
The last stage in the transition process will occur when Yahoo! Search ad serving moves to adCenter, which we expect to begin in mid-October and be completed by the end of October. During this period, you should expect traffic from your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to decrease, and increase in your adCenter account. But until this process is complete, you’ll still need to actively manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to have your ads displayed on Yahoo! and our partner sites.

Commitment to quality continues
Our primary goal remains providing you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. While we are confident that the preparation work done to date and the transition plan we are moving forward with now will help us reach this goal, please remember that deferring the paid search transition to 2011 is still a possibility if we conclude it would improve the overall experience.

We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

— The Team

According to the NY Times, these defendants allegedly:

Microsoft said it found a pattern of click fraud on its search pages,
where lists ranked by relevance and popularity appear alongside a
handful of paid results. Advertisers bid on what they will pay to
appear in the paid-search results for certain keywords. The more an
advertiser pays, the higher they are in that list, and advertisers
usually pay for each click on their ad.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Since announcing plans for the partnership in June, Google and Yahoo Inc. have been negotiating with the government about possible modifications that would address objections from advertisers. “However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement,” Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement today.

The government made clear in its own statement that it viewed the proposed deal as anticompetitive. “The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition—lower prices, better service and greater innovation,” Thomas O. Barnett, the assistant attorney general who heads up the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, said in the statement.

In its own statement, Yahoo expressed disappointment over Google’s decision, but says the deal was only an add-on to Yahoo’s own product road map “and does not change Yahoo’s commitment to innovation and growth in search.”

Google’s announcement is good news for search advertisers, says Mark Simon, vice president of industry relations at search marketing firm Didit LLC. “As Google’s reach in the search landscape has grown exponentially, it is important to the advertiser that there remains viable competition in this ecosystem,” Simon says. “Without having those options, we are all under the direct control of the lead horse.” He added his hope that Yahoo, the second-leading search engine, and No. 3 Microsoft Corp. “can help create this environment of choice for the marketer.”

Search marketing firm SearchIgnite released a report in July saying that pay-per-click ad prices could go up as much as 22% as a result of the planned Google-Yahoo partnership.  Source

Im not sure how much this would have raised any prices, I mean the bottom line here is that it would have just meant your Google adwords ads would now be shown on Yahoo sites, giving you more exposure at a higher cost.  It probably makes more sense to just open a Yahoo PPC account since the prices are usually cheaper at Yahoo per click. 

If your law firm is considering advertising online with Google, contact us for a free PPC analysis. We have helped many lawyers setup PPC programs at Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing and MSN adcenter and have saved them all a lot of money.  PPC works because it can drive the types of clients your looking for directly to your website.

Ive had many occasions where the person is paying $20 or more to much per click, usually because they set one high amount for their max bid on all keywords.  If you say you will bid a max of $60 per click, there’s a good chance you will and that can really add up.

In the case of this client, who is a Boston criminal Dui lawyer, he was paying a high amount per click so that he could be at the top of the sponsored matches.

$25 A CLICK SAVINGS IN FIRST WEEK, $1000 SAVED

You can see in the chart below that on Feb.12, 2008 he was paying on average $35.83 per click and he was on average in position 1.3. Yet on Feb. 14 the first full day after I took over and made changes, he got the same # of clicks but was only paying $10.69 per click and the only downfall, is he slipped to ad position 2.3, no big deal but what a savings of $25 per click.

Then if you look at the totals for the first week where I took over compared to the first 10 days of February, we got more clicks for over $1,000 less. This is only one campaign of 5, so just a portion of the overall savings.

Looking at the amount spent on 2007 ($45,000+) we would wind up saving the client over $25,000 at least just for this one campaign, and probably wind up getting more clicks.

Part of the reason he is getting more clicks for less is because when you set your bid to high, you might meet your daily budget much quicker, so your ads will be taken down until the next day.

Here are the stats for the first 7 days of when I took over, the 10 days prior and then the totals for Jan. 2008 and the entire 2007.

These are some huge savings and it won’t always be that much but usually I find that there’s always some room for improvement on pay per click campaigns. You really have to pay attention to them and track the progress and it helps to hire someone who does it all the time.

If we can assist your law firm with pay per click marketing, contact us today and we will review your campaigns and help save you money.

We will be helping this client save even more money once we do his organic optimization work. It makes sense to have top 10 rankings for keywords your bidding over $25 per click on! Once that is achieved, then you can reduce the amount spent on pay per click.

Clicktracks is well known as a significant player in the analytics space, and is in particular well known for the click fraud analysis tools that they provide to their clients as part of that package. Recently the Clicktracks CEO, John Marshall, and I spoke about click fraud in a podcast we did together.

John provides an excellent overview of what click fraud really is, how pervasive it is, and what the search engines are doing about it. For example, John outlines that click fraud affects sites in a very random manner, where some sites are hit very hard by it, and others not at all. John also indicates that the problem is much worse in very competitive markets.

When I asked John if the search engines were doing enough to combat click fraud, he provided an answer that will surprise most people (the answer was "yes"). John is not minimizing click fraud when he says this. He is simply saying that it is incumbent on the advertiser to play an active role in combatting click fraud as well.

Click fraud does exist and you have to monitor your pay per click campaigns and pay attention, otherwise your going to wind up paying a lot more in the long run. 

The better investment for the long run is to make sure your website is setup to be well ranked in the organic listings. No need to worry about click fraud then!

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

Google advertisers have been clamoring for a hard number to put on click fraud for years, but Google has been unwilling to share specifics. The company has often said that revealing too much would make it easier for fraudsters to take advantage of the system, which has frustrated advertisers who want to know where their money is going.

This revelation is the latest in a series of moves designed to offer more transparency to advertisers, Ghosemajumder said. Google has come under fire from lawsuits, click fraud reporting firms, and advertisers in recent months, all looking for more granular details on the level of invalid clicks occurring in the AdWords system.

Google is also undertaking several more click fraud-related initiatives in coming months. Among these are IP Filtering capabilities for advertisers, enhanced invalid click reports, educational initiatives, and an improved reporting format. The first three initiatives are expected to roll out this month, while the improved reporting format will come later this year, he said.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

Judge Joe Griffin of the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas made no changes in approving the settlement, which calls for Google to pay up to $90 million in online credits to customers and legal fees, according to court documents.

The Google settlement hearing is part of a broader legal action by plaintiff Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles originally filed in February 2005 against Internet advertising industry players over the issue of so-called "click fraud".

SOURCE : REUTERS NEWS