Why You Should Run Campaigns on Bing Ads

The Basics of Bing Ads

In concept, Bing Ads is essentially the same as Google Ads: a pay-per-click platform that helps your ads connect with specific audiences and based on search intent. Like Google, Bing Ads allows you to create campaigns structured using ad groups, keywords, and ads. Bing Ads also lets you use the same kinds of keyword match types that you’ll find in Google Ads, so your keyword strategies developed for Google will translate directly over to Bing.

Owned by Microsoft, the Bing search engine powers search on the Bing, AOL, and Yahoo betworks. So when you use Bing Ads, your ad can be seen on all of these platforms and can be show to people using any sites owned or operated by these three, plus their partner sites.

The major difference between Bing Ads and Google Ads is that Bing has a smaller audience overall, so you don’t want to use Bing Ads exclusively. What you can do, however, is use Bing to augment your Google Ads campaigns. And if your Google Ads campaign is having trouble in certain areas, you can try Bing Ads to fill in the gaps.

If you’re familiar with Bing Ads but are feeling wary because you remember them being difficult to navigate, they have recently improved their UI design, which has made it more efficient and user-friendly.

Reasons to Use Bing Ads

There are many reasons to use Bing Ads, but we’ve narrowed it to six of our favorites below.

Reach New Audiences

One of the best things about using Bing Ads is that it allows you to reach new audiences. According to Bing, their ads reach 69 million unique searchers that are not reached on Google. They also have 24 percent of the US search market share. While it’s not a good idea to devote all of your ad budget to Bing, it can definitely help you reach people that Google doesn't.

In particular, Bing Ads connect you to users of the Yahoo Bing Network, which attracts an older, higher-income demographic. 38 percent of Bing’s audience make $100,000 or more annually. They also spend 34 percent more than other audiences when making online purchases from their desktops. In addition, 89 percent of their audience is 35 or older, which means they’re likely to have more buying power.

Save on PPC Ads

Another attractive reason to use Bing Ads is because when compared to Google Ads, PPC ads cost substantially less on Bing. In fact, the average cost-per-click on Bing Ads can be 50 - 70 percent lower than Google. When considering this statistic, it’s important to remember that the Bing audience is substantially smaller than Google's, so although you’ll be paying less per click, you will be reaching a smaller group of users. You are still going to need to pay Google's CPC rates to reach the broader audience.

Increase Your Conversion and Engagement Rates

When you want to improve conversion and engagement, Bing also excels. Users who click Bing PPC ads tend to engage more with advertisers’ sites and convert at higher rates than Google Ads users. A case study by Search Engine People revealed that automotive industry Bing Ads users were converting at rates between 10 and 56 percent higher than Google Ads.

Easy-to-Use Features

Setting up new campaigns, running analytics, and scheduling ads can all be time-consuming. But Bing makes all of these things easier.

For starters, you can simply import your existing Google Ads campaigns into Bing and avoid starting from scratch.

Second, they make keeping track of your goals and determining ROAS easy with their Universal Event Tracking tool. Here, you’ll get insights into how well your campaign is performing through metrics including bounce rate, duration per visit, pages per visit, and more.

Finally, with Bing Ads you’ll enjoy easy ad scheduling because you’ll be able to assign different ad groups within a single campaign to different time zones. When you compare Bing to Google Ads where you have to set time zone at the campaign level and must create new campaigns to make changes, Bing is much easier. Bing also allows network, language, ad rotation, and more to be adjusted for specific ad groups.

Flexible Targeting and Keyword Features

When it comes to device targeting, Bing Ads is more flexible than AdWords, where device targeting can be difficult. Bing Ads users can target specific audiences based on the types of device they use. It also allows users to target only mobile users and opt out of desktop advertisements. With Google Ads, this isn’t an option.

In addition, while Google has made close variant keyword matching mandatory by including plurals, misspellings, and other grammatical variants in search term matches, Bing lets you choose whether you want to opt in or opt out of close variant matching.

Conclusion

Using Bing Ads is a great way to complement your Google Ads strategy. As you do so, remember that Bing has a lower market share, so it will likely drive less traffic in many cases. But this doesn’t mean it’s useless, as you may be reaching audiences you cannot reach with Google. It may take a bit of trial and error to find out which campaigns work best where, so make sure to test their performance and make changes as you go along.

As a side note, Megalytic has just introduced Bing Ads Reporting. So now you can generate reports that show performance across both paid search platforms.