When you ask someone how they found something on the internet, the response that you are most likely to hear is “I Googled it.” With Google’s global search market share at an overwhelming 70%, the “Googled it” response is predictable. Over 2/3 of searches worldwide are conducted by Google’s system.
Agencies, businesses and solo entrepreneurs are all viciously battling to get their products, services, and/or brand names into the top positions of both the paid and organic listings on Google results pages.
It’s understandable and pretty much essential for the modern online business to be intimate with Google AdWords, but we would like to introduce another search market player, one who is not so big, but offers much of what AdWords does at a cheaper premium.
This network is Bing Ads, and it can be a worthwhile, profitable addition to your PPC armory.
The Bing Ads network is Microsoft’s answer to AdWords. In what might be described as a David versus Goliath-esque battle, the two networks confront each other over market share.
A 10 year deal with Yahoo, in which Bing Ads has gained access to the Yahoo network for the service of its advertisements, has allowed the Bing Ads network to become a sizeable aggressor on global search market share.
Looking at the global net market share chart above, you can see that the two networks—which Bing Ads has access to account for nearly 20% of searches worldwide. This piece of the pie is nothing to scoff at.
The Bing Ads’ slice of pie becomes even more impressive when you close in on the United States search market share. A February 2015 comScore report for the US pegs Bing Ads’ search market share at over 30%, or 3.4 billion searches in February.
With nearly 1/3 of all searches occurring on the Bing network, a US business that does not take advantage of Bing Ads is potentially missing 1/3 of its customers.
Bing Ads is the network saying “I am a contender,” and it makes sure that those who use it can say that they’re contenders in their industries as well. Bing Ads is smart about how it does this too. Knowing that almost anyone who is using Bing Ads is probably using AdWords as well, Bing’s PPC system is nearly identical. This allows users from either network to easily transition between the two.
Some of the notable features that Bing Ads offers:
Import your AdWords campaigns.
Bing Ads offers full functionality for the importing of your AdWords campaigns.
Entering Bing Ads PPC does not require a brand new account build for existing AdWords users. This means that previous account structure efforts, like your keywords, negative keywords, ad groups, etc., are all easily recreated within the Bing platform, smoothing out adoption of the network.
While the initial account can be transferred, ongoing management requires separate optimizations to account for the differences between AdWords and the Bing Ads networks.
Even though Bing offers an account transfusion, we have found that it can sometimes be incomplete, requiring a thorough check up to make sure that it is healthy for Bing, and not lacking essential components that may have translated incorrectly.
This means that adding Bing Ads to the PPC armory will also require additional management manpower to obtain your business’s desired results.
Fewer competitors and cheaper CPC’s
Less search market share means fewer advertisers. Many businesses write the Bing network off because of the dominance of Google, creating less competition on the Bing results pages.
Using the same auction based system as AdWords, a variety of factors are analyzed to determine the bidding price of positions on Bing Ads’ results pages.
The maximum bid a business is willing to make is a major factor in this analysis, and if there are fewer competitors bidding, the maximum bid required for a top position is naturally lower.
This means that both the cost of clicks is cheaper and the positioning of your ads is better on the Bing Ads network when compared to AdWords.
Furthermore, if a business in a competitive vertical is seeing itself pushed out of the search results on Google, Bing Ads may offer a solution that captures more traffic at a cheaper cost as many competitors may not be on the network.
A study by AdGooroo demonstrates the cheaper clicks available on the Bing Ads network:
Easy access to competitor information
Bing Ads has a nifty thing called the Bing Intelligence tool. This intelligent bad boy has a lot of uses, but one of its most advantageous is the “Auction Insights” component. Auction insights can show you how you stand up to your competitors, giving you a good idea of how you can improve your competitive edge.
Within the report you can see:
- Display url domains: The display URLs of advertisers competing in auctions with you
- Impression share
- Average positions
- Overlap rate: The percentage of time a competitor’s ad shows at the same time as yours
- Position above rate: The percentage of time a competitors ad is in a higher position than yours
- Top of page rate: The percentage of time your ad is in the top position of the results page
- Outranking share: The percentage of time your ads showed when a competitors ad was in a lower position or did not show at all.
- Display url domains: The display URLs of advertisers competing in auctions with you
More flexible time zone and location options:
Unlike AdWords, Bing Ads allows you to assign different campaigns different time zones. You can also adjust your network, location, ad scheduling, and language options at the ad group level. This flexibility lets you create and manage sophisticated international targeting strategies more easily than in AdWords.
Search Demographics
The adjustment of bidding for different demographics is another fantastic capability that Bing Ads has. AdWords only offers this kind of targeting within its display platform, but Bing Ads lets you choose how you will bid on demographic options in the search platform as well.
From age to gender, you can refine how you want to bid, aggressively or defensively, on different demographics of people. Coupled with the advanced ad scheduling mentioned above, Bing Ads campaigns can become highly targeted secret weapons.
Neat Annotations
AdWords offers its advertisers ad extensions that add more information to the ads that are shown. Bing Ads shoots another David versus Goliath pebble and offers, in addition to ad extensions, annotations.
There’s a bunch of them and they’re not always guaranteed to show, but when they do, they make your ads a little bit better, and who doesn’t want that? Here are the available annotations:
- Merchant ratings: Displays your business ratings and links to helpful reviews
- Favicons: Displays your logo beside your display URL
- Smart Annotations: Displays products and brand names that are featured on your site
- Twitter Annotations: Show your numerical twitter following, social proofing your ad
- Dynamic Sitelink Annotations: Bing automatically creates links to deeper content on your website, if you have the Sitelinks extension already
- Top Ad Annotations: Signals that your ad consistently receives high engagement, increasing trust and credibility
- Long Ad Title Annotations: Ads the first sentence of your ad description to your display URL, increasing the visibility of your Ad.
- Previous Visit Annotations: Shows a customer how many times they have clicked through your website over the week.
- Merchant ratings: Displays your business ratings and links to helpful reviews
Bing on the Results!
We recommend that any business, especially those operating in the US, consider the added benefit of Bing Ads.
Although it’s never a good idea to abandon the reach that Google AdWords has, the additional reach and benefits of Bing Ads can take a PPC program to the next level. Adding Bing Ads requires additional time investment, but the results can pay for themselves.
If you’re interested in taking advantage of the Bing network, or aren’t seeing the results you expected from Bing Ads, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a free PPC consultation
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