Sometimes Bing Ads is the forgotten stepchild of PPC. The reasons probably trace back to when Bing Ads was very hard to manage and provided very little opportunity for the effort invested, but times have changed. With now more market share and easier tools to manage them, Bing Ads can be a lucrative opportunity for PPC pros to pursue.
These are some of the key reasons why Bing Ads deserves your attention, along with some tools to help you take full advantage.
Bing’s market share has grown six years in a row
PPC pros are busy people. Even when they use tools like Optmyzr to automate reporting, optimizations, etc, their days quickly get filled with new tasks, so they don’t have a lot of bandwidth to test different ad platforms. And with several platforms like Twitter, Amazon, Quora, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat all competing for attention, the platform has to rise above the noise if it wants any chance at getting a closer look.
Some good reasons why ad platforms don’t get an account manager’s attention:
There’s not enough traffic to produce a worthwhile volume of leads.
There’s good traffic, but the ad management system makes it difficult to manage the platform profitably.
The platform is too nascent and still needs to prove it has lasting power in the market.
And although the first reason was what kept Bing often overlooked and perhaps a bit off-side, to say today that Bing is still “too small”, would be a complete misconception.
Bing’s share of the search market has been growing six years in a row and now reaches nearly half the US population – (according to ComScore, the Bing Network had 142 million unique searchers in July 2017) including 68M searchers that cannot be reached on Google alone.
Besides the US, Bing has also reached respectable market share in other big markets like Canada (17%) France (18%), the UK (25%), and Australia (12%), according to comScore qSearch data from June 2017.
When you put Bing Ads and AdWords side-by-side in a dashboard, like the Optmyzr MCC dashboard, you’ll notice that Bing is in fact big enough to make a sizable impact to your ad campaigns.
The Optmyzr dashboard brings together Bing Ads and AdWords accounts in a single view, making it really easy to see how much Bing contributes to your PPC efforts.
Bing Ads has become easier to manage
Bing has enough market share to warrant the attention of any advertiser looking for more conversions, and with this newfound expansion, it is only logical to wonder whether their management platform improved as well.
One of the things that troubled Bing Ads users was the difficulty in the management, and the complexity and time required to create actual profitable outcomes. Luckily, Bing realized that improving their tools was just as important as growing their market share.
When Bing Ads was introduced as an AdWords competitor, it was charting its own course and doing things differently from AdWords. But that made it hard to manage for someone who already knew AdWords well. So Bing started to make their ad platform look almost exactly like AdWords, adding similar capabilities in lockstep with AdWords. As a result, Bing Ads accounts are now so structurally similar to AdWords that they can be simply imported into Bing with the account syncing feature.
And thanks to tools like Optmyzr which streamline best-practice optimizations that experts want to do, it takes less time to optimize Bing Ads after you’ve set them up.
PPC management tools like Optmyzr make it easy to understand the engine’s data and act on it to optimize an account. In this example, the Bing Ads interface uses long tables to change dayparting adjustments. The Optmyzr interface uses a more intuitive graphical interface and even offers suggested bid adjustments.
Bing performs better when managed separately from AdWords
Bing makes it easy to copy and sync AdWords accounts. But if you get paid to manage PPC, whether through an agency or as a member of an in-house team, you might make your client or boss happier if you manage Bing on its own to drive better results. So rather than doing a periodic sync, consider Bing Ads as its own entity and use their unique data to make optimization decisions.
Frances Donegan-Ryan, who leads Bing Ads’ Global Community Engagement for Microsoft, agrees and says “You can’t just mirror what you do in Google because our audience and marketplace is unique and different.”
According to Microsoft’s internal data from July 2017, 27% of the clicks on Bing Ads come from searches that are unique to the Bing Network. So an assumption that searches on Bing are just like those on Google can lead to under-optimized accounts.
Because Bing has a different audience with different behaviors, their users may respond better to different things than what works on Google. For example, different ads may resonate with Bing searchers in a very different manner than from Google searchers, so rather than using the results from your AdWords experiments to modify ads on Bing, use a tool like Optmyzr and use Bing data to help craft the perfect ad text for Bing Ads.
Create better ads for the Bing network by using tools like Optmyzr’s A/B testing for ads to remove losing ads and quickly create new challengers.
Because the competition on Bing is different, you may also get more value by deploying a bidding strategy based on Bing’s Data rather than just copying your AdWords bids. Tools like Optmyzr make it easy to find opportunities where you can move up to the first page at a low incremental CPC, buy more traffic for well-converting keywords, or create your own custom bidding method with a rule-based optimization, even using your proprietary business data as part of your custom algorithm.
And if you’re an agency managing Bing Ads for a client, chances are you’ll have to explain Bing performance on its own. Rather than laboring over hard-to-interpret data tables in their interface, advertisers can leverage tools like Optmyzr to get quick insights about what is causing changes in performance.
Optmyzr’s Data Insights like the PPC Investigator visualize data to make it easier to understand. In this example, it illustrates why conversion volume for a Bing Ads account has changed.
Tools make Bing Ads easier
While Bing Ads now reaches more people across the globe, and has tweaked its platform to make those ads easier to manage, there are still usability gaps. PPC tools like Optmyzr address those gaps by providing time-saving solutions that help PPC pros manage accounts faster and better.
Even with AdWords, which has addressed some long-standing advertiser requests like n-gram reports, better geo visualizations, and access to historical Quality Score, there are still significant benefits in using a tool like Optmyzr which is very focused on making this data easier to understand and act on.
With Bing Ads, many capabilities still lag a bit behind, so a tool like Optmyzr can provide an immediate impact on a PPC pro’s ability to deliver profitable results.
For example, to get a geo report in Bing Ads, advertisers download a user location report as an Excel file. This report is not interactive, making it hard to come to a useful insight because there’s no quick way to ask different questions like which campaigns have unusual geo performance.
With Optmyzr on the other hand, a Bing Ads advertiser can run a geo Data Insight to get an interactive visualization. They can then also act on the insights by using a Geo bid adjustment optimization.
Optmyzr streamlines tasks that are hard to do in the engine’s own ad management system, like analyzing performance by region and setting corresponding geo bid adjustments.
Conclusion
Bing Ads can be really easy to manage when you have the right tools, including a mix of the Bing Ads interface, their Power Editor, and a third party tool like Optmyzr. Combine this with the increasing market share that is making Bing Ads a bigger potential source of high quality leads every year, and it’s clear that Bing Ads should be part of your PPC buy in 2018.
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