Bing Shopping Ads: Why They’re Important and How to Get Started
Google is the most popular search engine in the U.S., but it doesn’t have a monopoly on search traffic. Bing, despite its late entry to the market, is solidly in second place among U.S. search traffic ahead of Yahoo, MSN, and others. Considering that there are over 15 billion searches in the U.S. each month, Bing provides a significant opportunity for digital marketers even if it isn’t the market leader.
Despite this opportunity, many companies overlook Bing and focus their paid search efforts entirely on Google. This means that not only does Bing get significant search traffic, but it’s also considerably underserved compared to Google by your competitors. This makes it an even larger opportunity.
Getting started with Bing isn’t very difficult if you’re already running Google AdWords. It’s simple even if you aren’t. Here are three things you need to know about paid search advertising on Bing:
1. Understanding the Bing Audience
Bing’s audience is quite broad, but it’s not exactly the same as Google’s. On average, Bing’s audience is less likely to use mobile than Google’s audience. They also have considerable spending power. Almost half of all Bing users have an annual household income over $75,000 and almost a third have an annual household income over $100,000. Over half of all Bing users have a Bachelor’s degree or an advanced degree. As you tweak your ads for your own specific audience, make sure to keep these trends in mind.
2. Diving Deeper Into Ad Groups
Google AdWords gives you a ton of control over your overall campaigns but you don’t have the ability to tweak things at a more granular level. Bing gives you a bit more control. For example, you can set things like language, network, and location at the ad group level instead of at the campaign level. You can also assign different time zones to each campaign. You can therefore make adjustments much quicker instead of having to create a brand-new campaign each time you want to make a change. Overall, this is yet another reason that advertising on Bing provides opportunities that advertising on AdWords simply doesn’t.
3. Controlling Your Search Partners
With Google, you have the ability to target Google search alone, or to target Google search and their partners. With Bing, you have much more control. When you include Bing search partners in your campaigns, you’ll be able to run reports that show which partners are driving traffic to your website. More importantly, you’ll be able to see how each partner performs in terms of cost and conversions. If certain partners have a particularly high cost or a particularly low conversion rate, you can choose to exclude them. Make sure that you regularly review and optimize your search partner performance in order to get the most bang for your buck.
Bing shopping ads are often more cost-effective than Google AdWords and provides more than enough opportunity for businesses to take advantage of. To maximize your success, keep the tips above in mind as you start to brand your search advertising efforts out.
For more ways to take your paid search marketing to the next level, take a look at our article ‘Dynamic Search Ads Will Rock Your (Marketing) World’ to learn everything you need to know about dynamic search ads!