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Bing Listens: Your feedback reshaped Bing Ads for the second half of 2018

At Bing Ads, we believe that one of the best ways to improve our product is to listen to our clients and solve the problems that are most important to you. For this reason we’re constantly reviewing feedback that you've shared on our UserVoice feature suggestion forum and using these ideas to improve our product.

During the second half of 2018 we've made improvements in the following areas, based on your valuable feedback:
  1. Better tools for understanding your competitors on Bing Ads
  2. New automated bidding options
  3. Better support for campaigns that target multiple languages
  4. New insights into placement of your Shopping Ads
  5. Easier discovery of hidden volume opportunities for Shopping Campaigns
  6. Time-saving ways to manage your budgets and billing

Better tools for understanding competitors on Bing Ads 

The auction insights report is a useful tool for understanding how your ads have fared relative to competitors in Bing Ads auctions. However, a prior limitation of the tool was that it didn't show how your performance varied against competitors in the past.

Auction insights request in UserVoice forum

This limitation has been addressed with the release of the Competition tab, which is rolling out across our user base over the course of this month. With this new tool you can see auction insights performance data over time to see how you're faring against your top competitors and you can segment this data by device or time.

Product view of Competition tab
 

New automated bidding options

Choosing the right bids to provide the most effective results can be time consuming and error prone. This is especially true when optimizing to get more conversions or sales instead of clicks. For this reason, providing automated bidding strategies aimed at staying with a particular cost per acquisition has been one of the most highly requested features:

Bidding by CPA request in UserVoice forum
 
This feedback was addressed by introducing two new automated bid strategies; target cost per acquisition (CPA) and maximize conversions. These new bid strategies leverage unique signals that are only available in our bidding offering to drive real-time dynamic bidding adjustments.

Better support for campaigns that target multiple languages

If you're a global advertiser or you're targeting users in a country where multiple languages are spoken, then it's not unusual to have campaigns that contain ads in multiple languages. This scenario wasn't previously well supported in Bing Ads, resulting in multiple requests to address these gaps, including the following:

Target multiple languages request in UserVoice forum

Change the language and market request in UserVoice forum
 
We recently announced changes to campaign management settings related to languages to address these limitations. Previously, a single target language could be specified only at the ad group level and couldn't be changed after the ad group was created.

Managing multi-language campaigns in Bing Ads has become significantly simpler, and you can now:
  • Target one or more languages at the campaign level
  • Choose to use the campaign settings or optionally target a single language to override the campaign settings at the ad group level
  • Modify the language settings at the campaign and ad group level at any time

New insights into placement of your Shopping Ads

If you're a retail advertiser and want to know the positioning of your Shopping Ads, you've historically had limited information available to help you optimise and you've had no insights into placement. This resulted in multiple requests to include Absolute Top Impression share metrics as part of existing Impression share data.

With the launch of Absolute Top Impressions Share Report (part of the existing Impression share metrics for Shopping) in the Product Dimension and Product Partition reports, you'll now get insights into your overall prominence on the result page.

Absolute Top Impressions (ATIS) represents the share of your Shopping Ad Impressions that are shown in the most prominent position. This is a good way to understand how prominent your products are compared to competitors and your opportunities to improve placement by adjusting bid or budget.

Absolute top impression share is calculated by dividing the number of absolute top impressions by the number of total eligible top impressions.

Product view of Absolute top impression share reporting
 

Easier discovery of hidden volume opportunities for Shopping Campaigns

Due to the unique structure of Shopping campaigns with a nested product group and bids, sometimes it's challenging to figure out when the bids are very low and therefore getting no volume or not enough volume. The adgroup / product group overall may be performing, but individual product groups may not be, and there weren't any notifications to help you figure this out.

After evaluating user feedback around this, we've added updates in multiple places. There's now a notification in Product Group grids for bids that are too low so that you'll know that the bid needs to be increased. Also, if you try to edit bids and reduce them below 0.05, you'll now see an error.

Product view of low bid warning

Product view of low bid error

We realize that the minimum bid needed for delivering ads is different across platforms, so while you're importing your campaigns from Google you can choose to increase your bids specifically for Shopping Campaigns based on the new warnings that we'll display in cases where we know your bids are low and won't get any volume on Bing. This will help you make bulk updates to Product Groups / Shopping Campaigns independently without impacting other entities in your import session.

Product view of Import Campaigns screen
 

Time-saving ways to manage your budgets and billing

Over the past couple of years, we've made it easier for you to manage multiple accounts on a credit line. In a continuation of that journey, we've now launched a couple of new capabilities.

 

Recurring insertion order capability

Recurring electronic insertion orders work such as recurring calendar events. Depending on how you manage your advertising budget, you might be using monthly, quarterly or annual insertion orders, or even insertion orders on a custom schedule. With our recurring electronic insertion order capability, you can set up your insertion order as a recurring series – specify your start date, end date, budget and recurrence, and we'll automatically create the relevant insertion orders for you, so that your ads can keep delivering. You can always make changes or even cancel the whole series or specific insertion orders within the series.

Rolling insertion order option request in UserVoice forum

Product view of Insertion Orders tab

Product view of creating a recurring insertion order


New invoice delivery options

You can now manage your accounts payable (billing) contacts and choose your invoice delivery options directly within our Bing Ads web interface. Even if the individuals managing billing for your business don’t have a Bing Ads login, you can add their email address and we'll deliver your invoices and statement of accounts to them as email attachments. You'll also get these faster now, by the second business day of the month. You can go completely paperless or also receive a physical invoice delivered via post.

Paperless billing request in UserVoice forum)

It's also now more seamless to switch between the supported payment options of prepay, threshold and monthly invoice. Additionally, we now support the ability to transfer your balance as part of the switch. For instance, if you started off with prepay and then decided to switch to monthly invoice, you can now transfer your prepay balance so that you can use it for your monthly invoice account after you’ve switched. 

Product view of changing payment method

Additional product view of changing payment method
 

Thank you for being a Bing Ads client and for making these and other great suggestions on how to improve Bing Ads to meet your search engine marketing goals. We look forward to receiving more of your suggestions in our UserVoice feature suggestion forum and to sharing another round of product improvements based on your feedback in our next Bing Listens update.