14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has started integrating traffic data from Yahoo into the webmaster tools for its own search / decision engine as of August 12, 2011, revealed Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program. But even though the process was kicked off last week, customers leveraging Bing Webmaster Tools only started seeing changes in traffic data as of this week.
“It took roughly four days for all of the data to populate across accounts to the full extent. For the month of August, accounts will note the changes in data numbers between the 12th and the 16th. September will be the first full month of combined data,” Forrester stated.
The move of blending together Bing and Yahoo traffic info is illustrative of the evolution of the Microsoft and Yahoo anti-Google search alliance.
While Bing Webmasters Tools accounts will remain unchanged for the most part, there will be areas sporting changes, such as the Traffic summary report and Page Traffic reports on the Traffic Tab.
Long story short, webmasters will be able to see a jump in their traffic data, which makes sense since the Bing Webmaster Tools now centralize information from both search engines. The values of impressions, clicks and Click Through Rates (CTR) will all go up.
“Impressions data will rise because we will now be showing you combined impressions for your listings across both search engines,” Forrester explained.
“For each query term in the list within the report, your impressions represent the combined number of times your result showed, based on queries initiated by searchers at both Bing and Yahoo. Clicks data will follow the same pattern. CTR data is a factor of the first two items, and will rise or fall based on searcher click activity at each search engine.”
Have a look at the screenshot included on the left in order to get an idea of how the new reports with the combined Bing and Yahoo data will look like.
“The changes affect the numbers shown only. No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools. As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages,” Forrester added.
“At this time the data will be combined, not selectable. The data will also update in any market where Bing is powering Yahoo search.”
