It is easy for digital marketers to dismiss Bing when we read that Microsoft’s search engine controls less than 3% of the market. Why bother focusing on a search engine that almost nobody uses?
But the truth is that Bing matters a lot more than you might think. That 3% figure is based on worldwide usage. In the US, Bing’s market share is double.
And if you look at US searches performed on a desktop, Bing’s market share rises to almost 12% at the time of this writing. You can explore these figures yourself using this free Statcounter tool.
If you are in the B2B space, desktop traffic is arguably the most valuable traffic. That’s because most people research business purchase decisions at the computer while at work. With over 10% of that traffic, Bing is too valuable to ignore.
An added benefit of Bing Ads is that they tend to cost susbantially less than their Google Ads counterpart. While your competitors are focused solely on Google, you can dominate on Bing and get a higher ROI for your marketing budget.
In this article, you will learn all about Bing Ads, its advantages, and campaign types. You will also learn how to use Bing Ads for your marketing campaigns, the right metrics to focus on, and how to track the results.
What is Bing Ads?
Bing Ads is Microsoft’s advertising service, where advertisers can go and target keywords in the Bing Search Engine. You can run Bing Ads to target customers and drive relevant traffic to get sales or conversions to your website along with a variety of other goals.
Bing Ads’ primary goals are to increase ad engagement and bring the right customers to your website. This might be for branding or driving leads to your website and to increase online conversions.
You want people to engage with your ads but also want them to convert to your website.
You can also optimize for foot traffic to get people into your ecommerce store if you have a local business or company.
You can also drive phone calls to your business and sell products online. With bing product listing ads, you can have your product ads in front of users searching for something in the bing search engine.
Bing Ads will also enhance your products and services in the advertisement with site link extensions where you can drive people to various sites or links on your website. It also comes with contact extensions where people can email you and all other similar things.
Microsoft Bing Ads also come with remarketing. So, if a user visits your website and doesn’t convert, you can target them in search and bid a little higher when they search for your target keywords.
Bing Ads also have shopping campaigns for your e-commerce business. This means that when a user types in a keyword that has to do with products, you could have ads that show up and drive traffic to your website having those products or e-commerce stores. This will help to drive sales and help to increase revenue.
How Much Does Bing Ads Cost?
A lot of keywords and CPC under the Bing Ads campaign are much cheaper compared to Google Ads. Bing Ads tend to yield a more mature audience with higher conversion rates. You may have an older audience, but they are more likely to convert on your website specifically for an e-commerce website or, in case you sell something.
The cost of a Microsoft Bing Ads campaign depends on your budget. However, the best thing about Bing Ads is that you’re only billed when you receive ad clicks. This means that whether your budget is $100 or $10,000, you won’t get a bill unless someone clicks on your ad.
You also need to understand that cost per click (CPC) for each ad may vary based on different factors, and prices are determined through an auction process across all advertisers using Bing Ads. But you will find the CPC much cheaper as compared to Google Ads.
You can determine the budget that is best suited for you according to your marketing goals. Also, you can customize the Microsoft Bing Ads campaign based on location, age, gender, to name a few, to reach more customers that are easy to convert.
Bing Ads Advantages
Advertising on Bing Ads comes with a lot of advantages for advertisers and digital marketers. This helps advertisers and digital marketers to optimize their campaigns to the fullest.
1. Better reporting
Microsoft Bing Ads provides digital marketers and advertisers a dedicated reporting service. These reports help you track your budget and finances, measure various ads’ performance, and help you adjust settings for your ad campaign to optimize it for better results.
You can easily extract data such as the keywords that you bid for or your campaign’s overall performance, to name a few. This data is crucial and helps you find valuable insights to optimize the campaign better and refine the targeted audiences for better conversion or sales.
Moreover, Microsoft Bing Ads also come with ad extension reports. This allows you to get the performance statistics for each ad extension based on click type for keywords and ads.
2. Campaign creation workflow
Bing Ads come with an all-new campaign creation workflow to get you started. With the help of campaign creation workflow, you can set up your first ad campaign with ease and advertise on bing.
Under it, you can easily establish a business goal to guide your campaign’s creation.
Moreover, you can also easily copy the campaign settings from an existing campaign and target specific locations.
Also, you will be able to get tailored keyword recommendations and access to the library of ad extensions that will align with your marketing goals. Set your budget and bidding options with ease and get a performance estimate for your campaign. This includes click, impressions, spend, and the average position in the search results.
3. Shared budgets
One of the main advantages of Microsoft Bing Ads is the shared budget. This helps you simplify and manage your daily budget. With the help of shared budgets, you can have a single budget that you can use for all the campaigns.
Moreover, it helps you reduce time to calculate budget manually and allocate to individual campaigns amongst other running campaigns. Also, you can easily advertise on Bing Ads with your unutilized budget.
This means that Bing Ads will automatically allocate the remaining budget to running campaigns that are performing well.
4. Device & location targeting
Advertising on bing allows you to customize the target audience based on geography, location, and devices, to name a few, as per your marketing goals. Microsoft Bing Ads provides you with a combination of tools to serve ads in the right region to target the right customers.
Bing Ads provide you with many options that include country targeting, location extension, ZIP code targeting, radius targeting, and interest or intent targeting. Moreover, it allows you to limit targeting entries and comes with map control and geographic location report.
5. Flexibility
Microsoft Bing Ads come with a flexible payment option that ensures that your campaign keeps on running. Microsoft advertising allows you to have a Back-Up payment instrument to your account if the primary payment method fails.
The campaign’s cost automatically gets deducted from the Back-Up payment instrument if the primary payment method is not working. This helps ensure that your impressions, clicks, and revenue are protected, and campaigns keep running as usual.
6. Low CPC
The competition over Bing Ads is comparatively low as compared to Google ads. This makes it a good platform for digital marketers and advertisers to advertise by bidding on low-CPC keywords.
Moreover, getting conversion on Bing is relatively high since you are dealing with a mature audience. Also, you will be able to do extensive A/B testing and gain valuable insights into the behavior and purchasing patterns of the targeted audience.
7. Better ROI
Running a bing ad campaign comes with a good return on investment if done correctly. Since the CPC for most of the keywords is relatively low on Bing Ads, this makes it easier for you to do A/B testing on your targeted traffic for various products or services.
This will help you get insights about what things are working and getting you the most conversions and sales. So, you will be able to optimize the campaign effectively and get more sales and conversions, leading to higher revenue.
Bing Ads Campaign Types
Bing allows you to advertise with a variety of ad types. This makes it easy for you to figure out the best ad type which is working for you and getting you the most conversions or sales. Below are some of the Microsoft Advertising ad types :
1. Expanded text ads (ETA)
Expanded text ads consist of four parts: the ad title, ad text, display URL, and final URL. Ad titles can support up to three headlines with up to 30 characters each.
Moreover, ad text can support up to two descriptions with a maximum limit of 90 characters each. Also, you will be able to preview your ad desktops, mobile devices, and tablets across Bing search results.
2. Dynamic search ads (DSA)
Dynamic search ads are similar to expanded text ads. The only difference is that these ads automatically target search queries on Bing search engine based on your website’s content. This is the best way to create targeted and relevant ads automatically and reduce your workload.
DSA also easily adapts to new search queries to get additional conversions. You can only use DSA ads in specific countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
3. Products ads
Product ads allow you to include your products’ custom images with promotional text, pricing, and seller details. You should know that the product ads are created in Microsoft Merchant Center, as Microsoft Shopping Campaigns, and are available in select countries. The countries include the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Germany, India, and Canada (English only and excluding Quebec).
4. App install ads
App install ads are also similar to text ads. The only difference is that you can include direct links to your apps with a button with app install ads. This allows you to send customers directly to the applicable application (Apple App Store or Google Play) store to download the application.
This ad is best suited for driving traffic for app installs rather than getting website traffic. However, this type of ad is only available in the United States.
5. Microsoft audience ads
Microsoft audience ad is also a native advertising solution. This type of ad allows advertisers and digital marketers additional high-quality traffic from non-search placements, which includes ads placed within articles, to name a few.
These ads are very engaging, and ad placements are cross-devices and appear on Microsoft Audience Network. However, this feature is only available in a select few countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
How to Start Your Bing Ads Campaign in 5 Easy Steps
Starting a Bing Ads campaign is not a difficult task as it seems to many newbies. You just need to follow these five easy steps mentioned below, and your campaign is ready to go live.
Step 1: Create your Bing Ads account
You need to sign up for your Microsoft advertising account or the Bing Ads account. You can simply visit https://ads.microsoft.com/ to get started. Click on Sign Up now at the top and fill in the information for your Microsoft Advertising account.
Then, you may get an option to import existing campaigns from your Google Adwords account. You can simply sign in to Google and choose your Google Ads account and your Google Ads campaign.
You may import all campaigns or any specific campaign. If you are not having your Google Ads account, you can simply click on create a campaign. Now, set up a payment method and the billing information details.
Next, go to campaigns and click on conversion tracking on the left-hand side. Create the UET tag page with the tag name and description. Then, simply copy the UET conversion tracking code and paste it into your website’s header.
Otherwise, you can also copy the UET id and open the Google tag manager to create a tag. Make sure to check if the UET tag is set up correctly. You may check for the same on the Microsoft Advertising dashboard to see the tag active.
Step 2: Campaign settings
Now, go to campaigns on Microsoft Ads Dashboard. Under create a campaign, choose the goal of your campaign. This can be to increase visits to your website or to increase conversions to your website.
Then provide the campaign name, budget (per day), location, and language. Then you may simply click on next and go to ad groups and keywords.
Step 3: Ad groups & keywords
Now, you will come to ad groups and keywords. Under this, create multiple ad groups with a set of keywords (get keyword ideas by typing website URL, products/services, or use Google Keyword Planner or Uber Suggest to search for keywords for your campaign).
Choose the keywords, and you may paste them on the enter keyword section. Try to use broad match and phrase match keywords for better results.
Step 4: Create your ad
Now, you need to create your ad. We recommend making at least two ads. Now, click on create an ad and enter the final URL (landing page), titles (30 characters), paths, ad text (90 characters), and you can also set up a new mobile URL which is optional.
Then, click on save or save and create another ad. You should also set up various extensions according to your landing page for better results, including site link, price, callout, location, and many more.
Step 5: Budget & bids
Now, set up your campaign budget on a per-day basis, bid strategy, and set ad group bids according to the keyword bidding. Also, go to advanced campaign settings to modify the location, ad schedule, and others as per your requirement.
Make sure to check the ads, the ads group, and keywords thoroughly. Now, click on save and launch your campaign. Now, make sure to optimize your campaign after running for a few days.
Tracking Your Bing Ads Campaigns
Microsoft advertising comes with conversion tracking. This helps you measure campaign impact to optimize and improve. You may track various conversions, including e-commerce, engagement, visit duration, pages viewed, and other events, by simply inserting a UET tag on your website.
You can also get metrics from app install conversions, such as the number of users who clicked and installed your mobile app. Conversion Tracking also helps with automated campaign management.
This includes bidding, optimization suggestions, and audience targeting. UET tags also help with remarketing. UET allows you to customize your bids, ads, and keywords for users who visited the website and just left.
Summary & Takeaways
To conclude, Bing Ads is one of the best online advertising services that your business can invest in. Bing Ads brings its users with various ad types and has less competition to dominate the marketplace. Moreover, while using Bing Ads, you have a higher conversion rate.
This is because your audience is mature and older, yet they are more likely to convert on your website specifically for products. Also, it comes with various features, including automated campaigns that help with time efficiently and manage your campaign.
So, if you are an organization, you should consider Bing Ads for your PPC campaign since it will be worth it for your business and help you generate more conversions, sales, and revenue.
