How to Have a Successful Bing Ads Campaign

Bing is an opportunity for any business to advertise at a typically lower cost than Google and reach a different audience. Even though a Bing campaign might look similar to AdWords at first sight, it requires different management and optimization strategies.

Here are five best practices for the setup of a successful Bing campaign.

Take Advantage of the Bing Campaign Planner

The Bing Campaign Planner feature allows for a thorough campaign planning as well as benchmarking and comparing your current Bing campaign to other campaigns on the market.

The advantages of the Bing Campaign Planner are three-fold:

1. Statistics Per Product Category

Source: Screenshot of Bing Campaign Planner taken by author

Statistics per product category will give you a better understanding of search volumes, average CPCs and traffic percentage per device. You should use this information to make decisions regarding budget and the creation of mobile dedicated landing pages

2. Statistics by Vertical

Source: Screenshot of Bing Campaign Planner taken by author

This insight allows you to look at in detail information about specific verticals. The additional data that you will find in the statistics by vertical that cannot be found in the statistics per product category are top of page CPC, sidebar CPC and best position CPC. This will be extremely helpful to set traffic and performance expectations within a given budget and better estimate the potential success rate of your campaigns.

3. Statistics About Product Competition

Source: Screenshot of Bing Campaign Planner taken by author

This is another important feature regarding competitor insights. You will be able to look at the ad coverage of a top url in the market, the amount of time it showed up first (best position coverage), the amount of times it showed up above organic results.

To access the Bing Campaign Planner, you will need to be logged in to your Microsoft account then go to the competition tab.

Do Not Start Your Bing Campaign by Simply Importing From Google

Bing allows to easily import your AdWords campaigns.  This will save you some time, however, the Bing campaign settings, keyword bids and ads must be adjusted. Most of the time, Bing will generate lower CPCs compared to Google and therefore you need to modify your bids to reflect that and to avoid overspending on traffic. A best practice is to start with a more standardized bid level and adjust it as one goes along.

You also need to compare your ads of your Bing campaign to the ones of your competitors. Most likely, you will see that they are quite similar to the ones on Google but it is always better to keep a close eye on it in case you need to adjust any of your ads to stand out more on the search results page.

Last but not least, You always need to make sure that your settings have been imported correctly to avoid any issue moving forward.

Set Up a Separate Desktop and Mobile Bing Campaign

In contrast to Google AdWords, Bing allows to separate mobile and desktop campaigns. This means that if you do not want to use a modifier you can create device specific Bing campaigns and customize your keyword’s bid based on the performance on each device.

As mentioned in point one of the article, you will be able to see how many users in your market search via mobile device. If mobile is relevant, it makes sense to invest the time in creating and optimizing two separate campaigns so you can maximize the return of investment.

Note: If you import from Adwords, you will need to change this up.

Run a Search Term Report to Identify New Negative and Long Tail Keywords for Your Bing Campaign

Similarly to what you already do on Google, you can run search terms reports in the “reports” section of your Bing account. You can find the search query report on the left vertical menu that shows up after clicking on reports:

Source: Screenshot of Bing Campaign Reports taken by author

You will get access to the the search terms that your ads actually showed up for. This is an effective way to find additional negative keywords (both broad and exact) and new long tail keywords for your Bing campaign. Depending on the traffic level you generate, it is best to run a search term report on a weekly basis to minimize the traffic that goes to irrelevant terms and harms both your quality score and ROI.

Have a Look at the Opportunity Tab to Reveal Great Keywords and Bid Proposals for Your Bing Campaign

The opportunities tab is often ignored but may include valuable insights regarding potential new keywords and bids. To get access to the opportunity tab, click on “opportunities” on the top of your screen.

Source: Screenshot of Bing Campaign Opportunities taken by author

Bing will not limit opportunities to bids and keywords and will also make recommendations regarding budgets, keyword match types and more. If you are interested in any of the opportunities Bing displays, click on “view opportunity” to display a what if analysis of what would change if you would approved any of the suggestions.

5 More Tips For Your Bing Campaign

The five best practices described above could help jumpstart your Bing campaign. Here are five additional points to think about when optimizing a Bing Ads campaign:

• Create a split testing schedule for testing individual ad components such as headline and description lines one at a time
• Find different ways to optimize keyword bids by considering sales volume, margins and conversion rates
• Test new ad group structures (time intense but worth it if it pays off)
• Adjust keyword bids based on geographical performance analysis
• Analyze competitors’ best practices and create split tests to target specific ads or offers