Top 7 Bing Ad Features You May Be Missing Out On

Whilst Bing Ads may not enjoy the instant brand recognition of Google Ads, it’d be unfair to dismiss them entirely. For ambitious and smart digital marketers exploring paid search opportunities, Microsoft Advertising – specifically Bing Advertising – provides a compelling PPC marketing opportunity.

With lower competition for keywords, granular audience targeting options, highly-engaged search niches, and plenty of dynamic ad placements, ignoring Bing Ads completely means that you could be leaving valuable income and ROI on the table. While yes, Bing has considerably lower monthly search activity than its counterpart, the industry leader Google Ads, it still has millions of searchers to target.?

In this short guide, we’ll explore some of the more underutilised features and capabilities of the Bing advertising platform that you may not realise even exist. By mastering these, your PPC advertising efforts on Bing could get off to a flying start.

What Makes Bing Ads So Great?

Whilst Google dominates the search engine marketplace, Bing still boasts millions of active monthly users. In fact, it’s suggested that Bing advertising allows you to reach 63 million monthly active searchers that aren’t reachable via Google Ads, either on the Google Display Network or the Search Network. This means that Bing possesses an incredible amount of potential users, even though it has a marginal percentage of market share.?

That’s not the only benefit of Bing Ads. For advertisers, the crucial key advantages to note are:

• Lower competitiveness – with fewer advertisers bidding on keywords in Bing, it’s easier to gain strong, prominent ad placements at a reasonable cost. This allows you to maximise visibility even on highly competitive search terms with thousands of monthly searches, and that is considerably harder to do in Google PPC campaigns.?
• Highly targeted audience – Bing users tend to be in a more ‘research’ mindset, indicating strong commercial intent. For instance, it’s widely believed that most Bing users are older on average, and are often actively looking for solutions via the search engine. Well-placed and convincingly-worded advertisements can therefore boost conversions significantly.
• Advanced targeting options – With the Bing advertising platform, marketers can target their audience by job role, LinkedIn profile, in-market, specific age brackets, income, and with plenty of helpful remarketing options. This is especially useful for campaigns run by companies that cater to very specific audience segments and have particular buyer personas.

• Improved CPC and conversions – properly optimised Bing Ad campaigns generally see better metrics than comparable Google Ads campaigns. The dynamic targeting options, lower competitiveness and better budget allocation paves the way for improved conversion rates and costs per click.

Top Bing Ad Features to Utilise

If exploring Bing Ads for the first time, many marketers rightfully want to make their efforts worth the time and investment. Many aren’t aware of how to make their Bing Ads convert right from the outset, and in a time when budgets need to be preserved as much as possible, it’s understandable. However, these seven – often underused or misunderstood – features could help you get your Bing PPC campaign off to a roaring start.

1. Import Your Top Google Ads

The easiest way to kickstart your Bing account is to import existing high-performing Google Ads. If you have run multiple Google advertising campaigns, you can immediately transfer over your ads, keywords, targeting settings and more to Bing with no additional setup. This allows you to get up and running quickly using Bing’s features. While it’s not a full-proof method to earning streams of impressions and clicks through Bing, it can be an excellent starting point for Bing novices.

2. Custom Conversion Tracking With UET

Universal Event Tracking (UET) allows you to create custom event and conversion actions, which, in turn, helps you track conversions on your site, automate your keyword bidding strategies and audience segmentation efforts. You can create custom goals like registrations, downloads, purchases and more to suit your specific campaign and audience segments. Over time, you’ll be able to improve ad performance and lower your CPC.

3. Highlight Key Info With Extensions

Bing provides plenty of ad extensions to make your ads more dynamic and spotlight your unique selling points (USPs). These ad extensions include sitelink, call, location, app, image, callout and review, which can all be incredibly useful for specific Bing Ads at various stages of the marketing funnel. They can make your ads more effective, informative, and relevant to the specific audience segment you’re targeting.

4. Target By LinkedIn Profile

You can align LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, with your Bing Ads and create targeted campaigns at specific LinkedIn members that use (or have used) the search engine. These campaigns can be new or pre-existing, and you can target or exclude users based on job title, company, industry, skills, and other LinkedIn profile data. This is perfect for drilling down on your ideal B2B audience.

5. Analyse The Competition

With Bing, you can uncover detailed metrics on competitor sites in your niche. The insights tool provides real-world data on the top keywords your competitors are bidding on, their ad copy, landing pages and more. Use this intel to refine your own strategy and identify gaps in the market where other Bing Ads could be placed.

6. Retarget Engaged Visitors

Using Bing’s remarketing features, you can remarket your ads to the exact type of audience segments that you want. You can tailor messaging to users who have already visited your site or interacted with your brand in some capacity. You can even set up custom events to remarket to individual users and remind them of your brand and products. By remarketing through Bing, you’ll have an improved chance at converting those users.

7. Edit Like A Pro With The Bing Ads Editor

This full-service desktop tool allows you to efficiently manage and edit your various ads and campaigns at scale, with advanced keyword, ad copy and bid adjustments. If you are serious about making your ads more dynamic and optimised, and driving conversions through the Bing search engine, it’s highly recommended that you download the Bing Ads Editor programme.

Maximising Your Bing Ads ROI

Beyond just utilising the platform’s unique capabilities, make sure to also:

• Test multiple ad variations – the more ads, the more data for optimisation. Use analytics to understand what is and isn’t working and refine from there.
• Use urgent, benefit-focused copy and clear CTAs that speak directly to the user’s needs and address their pain points.
• Target ads to different stages of the sales funnel, with tailored messaging for each stage and also remarket your ads to users that have not converted yet but could with persuasion.
• Pre-qualify your audience with precise demographics, interests, and remarketing. Conduct in-depth audience research to identify the ideal segments.
• Set up conversion tracking to understand your true return on ad spend (ROAS). Analyse the long-term value of your campaigns and use top performing ones as benchmarks for future campaigns as your business scales.
• Use negative keywords to avoid irrelevant traffic that will not convert.
• Factor in device-level data for mobile optimisation. Ensure that your landing pages offer a seamless user experience and load quickly for visitors.

Using Bing Ads and Google Ads in Tandem

With the right PPC marketing strategy, Bing Ads can drive qualified traffic, leads and sales at a reasonable cost – especially when combined with Google Ads campaigns for the bulk of the coverage.?

As an accredited Google and Bing Ads provider, Ginger Digital can help you build an optimised, integrated paid search approach across both platforms. Our transparent approach has enabled us to pinpoint very specific audience niches, create compelling content in-house (both for standard and video PPC campaigns), and earn improved engagement, visibility and conversions for our clients on both platforms.?

Get a free Bing and Google Ads audit and campaign review by contacting us today via our form. Our PPC experts can uncover the untapped potential of a combined Google and Microsoft advertising strategy for your brand.