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Search Marketeers, Bing It On!!

It’s the search engine that the ‘lazy’ search marketer doesn’t bother with in Australia due to the fact that Google has the lion share of the market. However, Bing’s market share continues to increase worldwide and with its market share of 11.5% in Australia it cannot be ignored. More importantly the account service levels of Bing Ads outperform those of Google and often, so do the results.

Here at Indago Digital, we’re big lovers of Bing Ads. Here are some reasons why Bing should be given more of a focus amongst your SEM marketing efforts:

  • Cost-per-click (CPCs) are largely cheaper in comparison with Google
  • Brand protection is easier
  • Ad extensions (callouts and reviews) are now readily available
  • Importing AdWords campaigns over to Bing has never been easier

Comparing CPC

So how does CPC compare across the engines? Well, looking at 2016 data across three of our clients in three verticals – finance, travel and hospitality - we can see that Bing has a much lower CPC. The difference on brand terms as an average across all three advertisers is 55%.

Bing1

Next we looked at pure generic keywords, where you can see Bing’s CPC came in at 33% cheaper on average than Google.

ExtraBing

Protecting Your Brand

For one of our clients, we noticed that numerous competitors were bidding directly on their brand and utilising it in their creatives which was driving up competition and causing CPCs to increase.

To put a stop to this, we informed our Bing rep, sent through some screenshots of the perpetrators in question and within a couple of days, they were able to stop the competitors using our client’s brand name in their adverts. This resulted in a dramatic decrease in CPC and increase in conversions:

Bing2

As a result of the fast actions from our Bing Ads account manager, our CPCs dropped by 52% and conversions increased by 42%.

Ad Extensions

Bing has recently made ad extensions available to advertisers, which are very powerful as they enable an advertiser to better inform their potential consumers about their products and services. Callout and review extensions have also been released and by adding these amongst your enhanced sitelinks, you’re increasing your ad size while pushing your competition out of the ad space.

With Callout & Review Extension

callout

We typically see click-through-rates (CTRs) increase in the region of 18% when these extensions are being utilised on Bing.

Bing 3

Importing AdWords Campaigns

Search marketers are too fearful of the work involved migrating their AdWords activity over to Bing but importing campaigns can take less than 30 mins when you sync your AdWords account with Bing (please be sure to check your settings before posting any activity into the engine).

If you’re running 3rd party tracking software such as Kenshoo & Marin, you also have the option to replicate your current Google AdWords activity over to Bing. It’s useful technology if you’re faced with these kinds of optimisation scenarios:

  • Reproducing the same campaign structure that exist on Google
  • Ensuring that any optimisations made across Google are immediately reflected in Bing
  • Being able to make copy campaigns over but use different naming templates

Why Bing Ads can give you an edge over Google Ads

Although Google has greater traffic volumes there are a number of reasons why Bing has a subtle edge:

  • There’s less competition meaning CPCs are often cheaper
  • Ability to target different time zones at the campaign level
  • CTRs, especially across Brand, tend to perform better due to less competition
  • Cost per acquisition (CPA) and Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) are often better

In the David vs Goliath battle between the two channels, Bing is steadily making inroads in the search market and should be a focus for search marketer, now, not in the future.