PPC Advertising Platforms: Is There A Clear Winner?

One of the hardest decisions a digital marketer must make when choosing to enter the world of paid advertising is deciding what kind of platform they are going to use. Because there are so many options out there, it can be difficult to decide what platform is going to allow you to design a digital marketing campaign the way you want, with the control you feel you need and within the price range that fits your business.

Two of the largest competitors right now in the PPC platform world are Google Adwords and Bing Ads. Many argue that Google Adwords is the clear decision, simply because it is more well-known and we often hear more success stories from the platform itself due to its large control of the paid advertising market. But after a thorough amount of research, I can tell you that it’s not the better-known platform that is going to get you more visibility—it just doesn’t work that way. Instead, diving deeper into each platform and what it offers will give you as a business owner much better insight as to which is going to give you the best bang for your buck.

GOOGLE ADWORDS

Google Adwords offers very user-friendly courses that give you a broad idea (as well as more in-depth idea, given you are willing to put in the time) of what the platform offers.

Basics, such as ad formats, available tools, and performance managing and optimizing suggestions are all including in the Search Advertising course. From this course, some key takeaways that Google Adwords seems to focus on are:

·        Keep mobile and desktop campaigns separate (as well as in all other aspects, rather than just solely campaigns)

·        Display ads are just as important as text ads and both can be created on both mobile and desktop channels

·        Target audiences better using location and language targeting

·        Keywords come in a different shapes and sizes—use keyword matching techniques like broad match, exact match, and negative match to better reach both general and specific audiences

·        Structure your campaigns so that each campaign has a different conversion goal and ad group to go with it

·        Extensions are numerous and include a wide variety of options

·        Cost shouldn’t be an issue: set a max average daily bid and let Google Adwords do the rest for you in terms of just over-bidding your competitors

·         Test different ad groups (a group of specific ads all focused on achieving the same conversion goal for a specific campaign) in order to gain a better idea of what works best

·        Generating Reports based on the data collected (assumingly via Google Analytics) will help you to optimize your PPC ads’ potential  (there are many to choose from, including Search Terms report, Top Movers Report, and Paid & Organic Report)

·        Offline editor helps with bulk and shared editing

BING ADS

While there are not any blatantly obvious Bing Ads courses available off the Bing Ads website, there area lot of success stories and articles discussing the main benefits of using Bind Ads. Here are some of the main ideas I got from poking through the Bing Ads website:

·        Mobile and desktop ads should be kept separate so as to better target audiences based on what type of device their using

·        Display ads are only available for windows apps only (includes both mobile and desktop)

·        Very granular location targeting at ad group level

·        Sidebar ads can still be beneficial, if used correctly; 3 ads at top of results page reappear at bottom

·        Some popular extensions like callout and review, and also image extensions, which may help increase CTR (specific to Bing Ads)

·        Keywords are incredibly important, so broad match modifiers as well as more exact match modifiers exist; use Search Term Report, which matches search terms with keywords for you

·        Ability to modify campaigns and specific tools at ad group level

·        Test different ad groups in order to better optimize paid ads

·        Personal aid for businesses from Bing Ads themselves

·        Less reach

HOW DO THEY COMPARE?

After looking through both platforms, I had a hard time determining if there was a clear winner, as many digital marketers believe there to be (Google Adwords).

While Google Adwords reaches a much more broad audience (77% of searches happen on Google, as compared to the 7.31% on Bing, according to Net Market Share), there are more specific elements that Bing Ads offers that Google Adwords does not that may be more beneficial to smaller businesses.

For instance, Bing Ads’ more granular location targeting makes it easier for a company to better hone in on audiences based on their locations, which can be beneficial for a smaller business working within its local community.

Because there is a smaller reach with Bing Ads, this also means that there is less competition that you are working against while bidding on ad space. Visual extensions like the Image Extensions that Bing Ads offers can help increase a business’ CTR, due to a large portion of the consumer audience being naturally drawn to enticing visuals.

While Google Adwords does not offer the Image Extension that Bing Ads does, it does, however, give a much larger variety of extensions to choose from.

Many of the success stories I read included the digital marketer’s experience whilst working with their representatives of Bing Ads, mentioning that the feedback and analytics received from the people at Bing Ads was one of the most helpful parts of using the platform altogether. You can see a more detailed example of this by reading this success story from Keypath Education.

Overall, it seems as though Google Adwords’ is a much better choice for someone looking to have a much larger, automated reach, allowing for more bulk advertising with more extension options and faster delivery (but not by much!), while Bing Ads seems to be a better option for smaller or local businesses in less competitive industries wishing to find more customers and increase sales through specific location targeting and personal aid from Bing Ads itself.

SO HOW DOES BING ADS HELP WHEN RUNNING A DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN?

Because I discussed the value and benefits of using Google Analytics in my last blog post, I’d like to focus more on the benefits of using Bing Ads in a digital marketing campaign here.

One of the major benefits of using Bing Ads is that it has a couple of really great resources that will help a business specifically during the process of creating and designing a digital marketing campaign.

While digital marketers will mainly be using social media outlets to greatly add to the success of a digital marketing campaign, Bing Ads Editor and Search Term Report are two major tools that can help add on to these campaigns even further.

Bing Ads Editor: This tool allows digital marketers to focus their efforts more on bulk editing, updating campaign details, and multiple account management. You can find and replace specific information across multiple accounts at a time to keep your campaign constantly up to date. This tool would be incredibly helpful for a business or organization that manages multiple accounts, such as the MBA program of Western Washington University. With multiple MBA programs to choose from, the digital marketer for the WWU MBA website could easily use the Bing Ads Editor to manage the different advertisements for each program. Instead of manually editing the advertisements for the Accelerated, Traditional, Evening and Weekend programs individually, one could update similar aspects for each separate program’s advertisement all at once. An example of this is updating the location and general contact information (assuming they were the same for each program) within each general PPC ad for the MBA program. Conversely, one could use the editor to update all PPC ads for one specific campaign (type of MBA program) only.

Search Term Report: This tool by Bing Ads essentially finds matches between search queries and keywords for you, so you don’t have to waste time doing so. This type of tool could be incredibly useful for WWU’s MBA in terms of increasing awareness because it will automatically determine what people are searching for when looking for an MBA program (possibly even in the PNW) and return major keywords back to you that you should use in your PPC ads. By using keywords that you know are being searched for when a consumer is looking for an MBA program, you are automatically placed within that user’s awareness set, and potentially even their consideration set (a little consumer behavior for all of you marketing-psychology lovers out there), increasing the number of daily/quarterly conversions for the site (which we can assume is applications to the MBA program). Western’s MBA program could potentially use this tool to get matching keywords for search queries like “Washington State MBA programs”, “MBA programs of the pacific northwest” or even more specific searches like “MBA programs near me starting Fall 2018”.

PPC ADVERTISING IN ACTION

While we are still focusing on Western’s MBA program, let’s take a look at some of the other ways PPC advertising could really help an organization like this increase brand awareness and conversion rates by a landslide:

·        Display Network ads: By using more than just basic text ads, the WWU MBA program could draw in more potential graduate students with ads that include images and/or videos of recent graduates on certain “placements” like StudyBlue, Wikipedia, and Investopedia.

·        Campaign structures: Google Adwords’ campaign structures are set up so that for every account, there are multiple campaigns, and even more ad groups within those campaigns. This type of structure is especially beneficial to an organization with a hierarchal structure like an MBA program. An account could easily be each type of MBA program offered, and within those accounts are different campaigns. One campaign may be focused on continuing education immediately after college, while another could be focused on helping those further down their career path returning to school to become even more certified for future endeavors. The ad groups within these campaigns may differ, assigning a couple different ads suggesting the same reason (or same campaign) for applying to Western’s MBA program.

·        Low cost: Because WWU’s MBA program is one that works with a much larger budget than a local elementary school might and has less competition overall (5 major universities VS thousands of elementary schools within Washington State alone), spending money on ad bids is something that may not be as big of a deal. In addition to this, the fact that Google Adwords only ever spends enough of your daily average max bid limit to outbid your highest competitor means that the leftover money that was not used on PPC advertising could potentially still be used elsewhere.

·        Devices: As we have come to learn within recent years, a vast majority of college-aged internet users are constantly using not only their smart phones, but all types of web-active devices as well on a regular basis. A great tactic Western’s MBA program could use is creating different PPC ads based on the type of device being used. This will not only allow those looking for an MBA program while sitting at their desktop doing homework or researching something have a better chance of finding WWU’s MBA, but also those who are on their phones walking to work or shopping in a grocery store find them as well.

While there is no clear winner when it comes to choosing the “right” PPC advertising platform, it is evident that there are countless ways for a business or organization to benefit from using PPC advertising in general. Mainly, it’s just a matter of experimenting and discovering which one works best for you and your business personally!

As always, please feel free to comment or share your opinions--I’d love to hear them.

Cheers,

Aubrey McNeil