Everything must change and so Microsoft Advertising is the new name for Bing Ads.
It’s been an interesting road for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising over the years. It all started on desktop in the 1990s but it wasn’t until 1998 that Goto.com pitched its idea at a TED Talk and later launched PPC ads go alongside its search engine results. In 1999 GoTo.com allowed advertisers to manage their ads through an interface, placing real time bids.
In 2000 Google launched Google AdWords. Like GoTo.com initially did, Google managed the ads on behalf of advertisers. Soon after, Google launched its self-service platform, seeding the tools we know today.
GoTo.com changed its name to Overture in 2001.
MSN, the Microsoft Network, displayed ads from Overture and its own adCenter.
In 2003 Yahoo! brought out Overture for $2.2 billion.
MSN then displayed ads from Yahoo! and adCenter. The organic search results were from Yahoo! too. It was in 2009 that the name Microsoft Advertising came into being as an umbrella organisation for Microsoft’s PPC ambitions.
Microsoft took over Yahoo! search in 2010 and by 2012 it launched Bing. The new search engine Bing also included PPC ads in the form of Bing Ads, the direct equivalent of Google AdWords.
Google AdWords was about more than just words though, so in July 2018 it was rebranded as Google Ads.
Microsoft Advertising
And now, twenty years after the birth of the Pay Per Click phenomenon, Bing Ads is now Microsoft Advertising.
As you can see, it’s been a long winding path for the two major search engines and PPC platforms, and we’ve not named every iteration or twist and turn in PPC history – it’s really very complex and not for this article.
See Microsoft’s own blurb on the announcement.
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