You know some of those ads you see on eBay’s website? They used to be served up by Yahoo’s ad platform, and now by Google’s. But after Google punished eBay in search results for “spammy techniques” earlier this year, eBay responded by turning to Microsoft’s Bing platform.
That’s according to Mark Ballard of Rimm Kaufman who blogged about it on Thursday.
Within a month of the penalty reports, RKG found a large volume of eBay search ad clicks starting to take place from ads served through the Bing Ads platform instead of Google AdWords, through which they had been served for years. Interestingly, the traffic that has moved to Bing appears to be exclusively mobile, with desktop ads still serving through Google’s search network program.
In other words, Ballard says the desktop ads on eBay still come from Google, but mobile ads come from Bing.
The relationship between eBay and Google has been rocky for years. We wrote about allegations of infighting and alliances between eBay, Google and Yahoo (and attempted alliances with Amazon as well) detailed in an antitrust lawsuit.
Google declined to comment. eBay did not respond to our inquiry by press time.
In related news, eBay UK told the Drum it was readying the launch of a suite of native formats for its mobile ad offering that will in time be sold programmatically.
