14 DAY TRIAL // This week, Microsoft announced more changes to the names of its products, in an attempt to make them easier to use.
Not only will the company use other names for the Windows Live services available for Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms, but it also announced that its “Microsoft Advertising” for small and medium businesses is becoming “Bing.”
The change was performed on May 1st, being destined to make it simpler for small and medium business search advertising customers to partner with Microsoft.
“This means our SMB customers will be greeted with the same dazzling photography and recognizable Bing homepage look and feel throughout their ad buying experience,” Microsoft’s Matthew Lydon explains in a blog post.
“Bing also attracts users who are in a decision-making mode. This means when SMB customers advertise using the power of Bing and Yahoo! core search sites through adCenter, they can easily go from advertising to selling.”
Basically, all SMBs interested in a partnership with Microsoft for advertising will have to go to Bing for Small Business, while large companies (any Marketer or Agency) will use the same Microsoft Advertising as before.
According to Microsoft, small and medium businesses have a lot to gain from choosing Bing, since they can reach up to 158 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo! Search (amounting for up to 5.6 billion monthly searches and a 29% search share) in the United States.
The Redmond-based giant also claims that 49 million unique searchers that are using Bing and Yahoo! Search in the United States (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites) do not use Google at all.
When it comes to the global market, Microsoft claims that around 19 percent of the unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo! Search do not use Google worldwide. The data comes from comScore Core Search (custom) and comScore qSearch (custom) and was collected in February this year.