Posted by Dan Parks, Senior Analyst, Planning & Analytics

At Performics, we’ve been tracking and evaluating the Bing/Yahoo! paid search migration.  On October 11th, our programs began gradually migrating traffic away from Yahoo! and into Microsoft AdCenter, and we expect a full migration by the end of this week.  We’ve seen traffic shift to AdCenter, with stronger pushes towards the end of the week (Thursday/Friday).
  
A few takeaways we’ve noted:

• In the first week we found that branded keyword traffic migrated more quickly than generic keywords.  Branded keyword traffic is less volatile, has a lower cost, and higher click-through-rate, thus moving these keywords quickly allows for a smoother overall transition.  We’ll need to continue monitoring performance as generic keyword migration catches up.
• We’ve found traffic is migrating relatively evenly by keyword match type where Standard and Advanced matched traffic has scaled down evenly on Yahoo; and Exact, Broad, and Phrase matched keywords are ramping up on AdCenter at similar rates.
• Most importantly, the sky is not falling; in fact so far everything is relatively uneventful. 
  o In the first week we saw some increase in CPCs, but these costs have since returned to normal seasonal expectations.
  o CTR and Conversion Rates have stayed consistent with seasonal expectations.
  o By now, a majority of your traffic should be running through AdCenter, and your program and bid management teams should have a good sense of how/if your program dynamics have changed.