Bing Ads: The Underdog of Paid Media

One the eighth day of Christmas Honchō gave to me Bing Ad campaigns… Dom, our Paid Media Manager, takes us through the importance of Bing Ad campaigns and it highlights from throughout the year.

For years, as we can all appreciate, Google has been the main “go-to” for almost everything online – directions, shopping, facts, information, you name it. This has also generally been the case for the majority of advertisers and agencies (Honchō included), who have chosen to focus almost all of their efforts (and budgets) into finding success on just Google – and rightly so when comparing monthly search volumes.

However, with Google being packed to the brim with advertisers all competing for the same click, combined with elements of distrust brewing against the search engine, the need to find pockets of opportunity elsewhere has become even more apparent.

Fortunately for Bing, since celebrating surpassing 20% market share in the UK (Sept 2016) Bing has grown from strength to strength and is finally coming out of Google’s shadow. Reports even suggest that a huge 33% market share was achieved in the USA!

Not only has the number of users increased, but the capabilities within the platform have also grown too. Admittedly, the changes seem to follow a very similar pattern to those on Google (e.g. new overview dashboard, 3 x Headlines etc), but that doesn’t matter too much as those changes are very welcome. What is pleasing to see is that the updates to the Bing interface appear to be happening within a much closer timeframe to those on Google, helping Bing to stay in touch, which is great news!

So, if you aren’t already been focusing on Bing Ads, here’s a couple of reasons why you should:

•   Lots of brands still aren’t running Bing Ads campaigns – even if they are, they generally aren’t “always on” or will most likely be on a significantly reduced daily budget, so you might be able to bid on a bunch of keywords with little to no competition

•   Because there are fewer advertisers, Ad Clicks (CPCs) tend to be much cheaper, meaning more traffic for your buck or a much healthier return on investment. Do you know the difference between CPC and CPM bidding? Check out our comparison!

• Expanded Text Ads are available within Bing Ads as of November 2018, meaning more characters and more Search engine “real estate”.

•   There are more bidding strategies available – both Target CPA and Maximise Conversions can be leveraged for maximum campaign performance.

•   Demographic is typically a mature user, so if this lines up with your target profile, Bing is a no-brainer.

•   Due to a mature user, those using Bing (according to reports) tend to have higher than average incomes, and so are less inclined to be motivated by price.

•   The interface itself is improving all the time and is pretty much a like-for-like with the Google AdWords interface (pre-July 2018) – so it’s quite an easy interface to navigate.

•   Bing is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft owns LinkedIn, which that means that Bing Ads has the capability to target by job title. If you’re in the B2B world or your product is perfectly suitable for a particular industry, this could be incredibly valuable for your campaigns.

The above is just a brief snapshot of what Bing has to offer in today’s market. Hopefully it continues to develop and innovate so that it can stay in touch and remain a valuable source of traffic. Fingers crossed for another year of growth for Bing!

Tweet Honcho_Search and let me know your thoughts. Have a very merry Christmas!