Can't We All Get Along?: Comparing Google AdWords and Bing Ads

If you're anything like former-me, you don't understand how, exactly, one search engine is different from the other. If you're a lot like former-me, you don't even understand that search engines actually do anything at all (besides regurgitate several results that may or may not help you).

The ads placed at the top of search engine results pages are often curated to give you, a consumer, an engaging experience. From a different perspective, marketers have a difficult task of choosing the platforms on which they want to advertise. Although Bing and Google look very similar, there are a variety of ways in which they differ in their advertisement opportunities. Let's dive into some of those reasons...

Know Your Options

In the basic variety of ways in which Bing Ads and Google AdWords differ, there are five basic differences that can be seen right off the bat. For starters, each search engine only shows your ad on their own platform, as well as their partners. In regards to display, with Google AdWords, you’re given two separate lines of text, and on Bing, you’re given one long line. With things like Budget allocation and Target selection, there are small differences between the two, so it is recommended that users are extremely vigilant when transferring data between the two.

Furthermore, there is an abundant difference when we look deeper into the purpose and utilization of each marketing system. 

Content around Bing ads focuses much more attention than Google AdWords on the emotion and psychological response of their clients' messages. Bing talks extensively about the best ways to bring emotional aspects into everyday marketing to increase clicks and conversions. In a Bing webcast, Purna Virji talks extensively about the art of having a “pain point” and “ego” in each one of the messages. The first part of the message should leave a feeling of “I should change this about myself” and the second point should leave a sense of “I can be better if I do ____.” A popular slogan genre that fits this model is the “Lose the weight, look great” concept. Upon hearing this at first, you think about all the extra weight you have packed on since college, and this is followed by optimism (or guilt) to look better. 

There’s no mention of these topics in the AdWords content. 

Additionally, while Adwords allows users to target specific groups only at the campaign level. This forces marketers to cast their nets fairly wide, as they aren’t able to manipulate their time zones or languages, for instance, on an ad group-level. Advertisers can’t even target specific devices on Google Adwords. Bing allows users the option to show certain ads on tablets, mobile devices, and desktop devices, specifically. Bing’s opportunities for digital marketing lie in their ability for consumers to see more applicable ads that will look most attractive to them in the mediums accessible to them.

With the largest pool to search within, AdWords holds much more priority in the ways in which Google will calculate businesses priorities when they crawl through results and create an index. For example, Google looks advertiser’s Quality Score, which is based on their keywords. The higher the quality of keywords pages has, the higher score. Overall, keywords are the biggest emphasis of Google Adwords. The quality of site and content are taken much more into consideration when ranking sites on the SERP. 

While Google AdWords is far more popular, Bing Ads seems to utilize content marketing to an extent that Google AdWords lacks. 

Know Where You Go

For organizations who seek to build brand awareness, it is beneficial for businesses to utilize paid search engines because they are able to narrow down their audience to pitch their services and opportunities to people who will actually bite. Geo-Target PPC doesn’t waste your money by giving people who are ‘out of range’ the opportunity to click on your ad. For instance, Cracker Barrel shouldn't risk a Washingtonian clicking on their ad, using up their advertising budget. Since Cracker Barrel does have any locations in Washington, people within that area who randomly click on their ad are very unlikely to complete a conversion. 

Or Western Washington University, for example, shouldn’t spend the bulk of their efforts advertising their MBA program to people who fall far outside of the Northwest of the United States. If people have completed their undergraduate degree in a state far outside of this boundary, they are less likely to attend graduate school there. 

Targeting directly to people who show the characteristics of being a student and interested in Business would also be beneficial for conversions. For applying to an MBA program, it is unlikely that people who do not show these interests won’t be a valuable audience for your ads. 

Before I took the Digital Marketing class, I rarely received ads that pertained to marketing or business opportunities. Taking this class and doing the groundwork for it has 'outed' me as someone who would find these resources beneficial and I have become a worthwhile audience member. 

PPC can also be valuable for remarketing. For instance, if someone filled out an interest form for Western Washington University, becoming a Lead, paid ads may encourage them to complete a conversion and finish applying to the program. 

The Bottom Line…

PPC marketing is a valuable tool with a high risk when done improperly. If your ads aren’t being targeted to the right people, you may be throwing them in front of an uninterested audience who may click on it, absentmindedly. This costs your business money that could be put towards improving your PPC marketing campaigns. From the research I have done, it seems that Bing Ads has given advertisers more options to cater their audience to who they think may actually engage with their company. However, the structure and technical emphasis that AdWords has may outperform Bing’s capabilities.