Today is a special day. Today we are not going to talk about Google. At least not all that much. Instead, we will give the spotlight to the second most preferred search engine in the world - Bing. You may have heard that we at Locus Digital love Google. We even tried to marry it at some point, but unfortunately, our lawyers were adamant that agreeing with the terms of use has zero legal rights to call Google our husband or wife. In fact, it seems that marrying a corporation is still illegal in the US, but that's an issue for another blog post.
You might have heard several dozen times from us that no one cares about search engines outside of Google. And with the giant's 92% of the market, that seems like a logical conclusion. Still, Bing gets over 1 billion visitors a month, and that deserves to be explored and taken advantage of. Consider Bing like your side chick, which you don't give nearly enough attention to, yet they still want to spend time with you and write to you every night.
With this in mind, getting some Bing PPC campaigns and fine-tuning your website so it can attract Bing free traffic is something that can complement your overall Google endeavors without putting too much effort into them.
But first, let's get the basics out of the way.
What Are Bing Ads, And How Do They Work
If you have a basic idea of what Google Ads is and how it works, Bing is essentially the same. Only smaller. Microsoft ads (as the official name of Bing Ads is) is a pay per click (PPC) platform designed to show your ads in front of a specific target audience based on keywords. If that sounds familiar, it's because it's the exact definition of Google Ads.
However, Microsoft Ads has one crucial benefit- it spreads your ad across all Microsoft channels, and your visibility explodes. Your ad will be visible on Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and other partnering websites. This way, you can cover everyone who prefers not to use Google for their searches. With 14,5 billion searches each month, that's not a particularly small audience that you can just decide to ignore.
Indeed when you look at the bigger picture, Bing and all other Microsoft platforms have a laughable search volume compared with Google, and one might just as easily decide not to invest their time and effort into creating an ad. So, let's discuss whether starting a Bing Ads campaign is worth spending time you could otherwise devote to pleasurable activities like watching Will Smith slapping Chris Rock on repeat for 6 hours straight. That's what I call time well spent.
Are Bing Ads Worth Your Time?
The short answer to this question is definitely yes, as long as it doesn't affect your focus on Google Ads. If you do it as a supplement to your Google PPC campaigns, Bing Ads is definitely a great addition to your marketing portfolio.
The main reason for you to allocate some resources to start a Microsoft ads campaign is its vast reach. Sure, it can't compare to Google's 91,5% share in the search engine market, but it covers several search engines, all of which are increasing their popularity and chipping away from Google's Godlike position. True, with the speed they are gaining on Google, they will get the crown a millennia after the Sun has engulfed the Earth, but still, their popularity is growing.
Nonetheless, they cover a vast audience that simply does not want anything to do with Google.
Furthermore, Bing Ads prove to be highly affordable. With low competition, the price of your PPC campaign can get 2-3 times lower than what you'd pay in Google for the same keyword. As a plus, the CTR is much higher as the average click-through rate is about 45% higher than what you will get on Google. The conversion rate is not that groundbreaking, with only around 3% of clicks ending up as an acquisition. However, taking the cost into account, the ads provide a CPA so beautiful you'd wish you could have taken it to the prom instead of your date.
Is Bing Better Than Google?
After all that sugar talk about Bing Ads, naturally, you wonder whether they are better than Google's PPC campaigns. Let me snuff that thought out of your head before you decide to allocate all your advertising to Bing. The short answer to this question is a definite, secure, and tight as a Brazilian butt, "no". Although Bing has some minor advantages over Google, the king of search engines still practically owns the market. You can't disregard Google since 91.5% of people are there.
However, Bing Ads offers you a cheap and efficient addition that will bring you some outstanding results. It's a great addition to your digital marketing, but it most definitely should not be your flagman ship in the battle for customers.
Bing Ads is also great for diversifying your portfolio. It's not a great idea to put all your eggs in one basket if you don't intend to make an omelet in the set basket.
Last but not least, Bing is one outstanding investment, and there are at least 5 reasons you should fund some Bing PPC campaigns. Let's have a look at them.
1. Reach A New Untouched Audience
The biggest benefit of Bing is the entirely fresh audience you can get your hands on. Not literally, since this would be a crime and a start of a new hashtag on Twitter against you, but figuratively, you will get up to 10% of the US market. Bing receives 6.6% of all searches in America and Yahoo another 3.25%, which comes to close to 10% in total. With a population of roughly around 350 million, this comes to approximately 35 million users that simply won't see you on Google.
Furthermore, all Microsoft platforms have around 4.5% of the entire global market, which is roughly 400 million people. Not a bad audience when you consider the low competition on that platform. Bing also enjoys approximately 1.1 billion searches each month, with its biggest markets being the USA (30% of all searches), China (29%) and Japan (4%). In addition, around 4% of Germans and the French also prefer this alternative search engine. Bing Ads is especially beneficial for the Chinese market, where Google is banned, and Bing is the better alternative if you are going to target China for some reason.
The kicker is Yahoo mail, which has roughly 228 million users each month, and sends approximately 26 billion emails every 24 hours. However, the best part is the type of audience these platforms attract.
2. Bing Ads Attract Better Quality Leads
Bing is the search engine of the young. Around 75% of all users are under 45 years old. These are the most economically active people, and there is no wonder that 58% of all searches are about product research.
In general, Bing users have higher average household incomes and are more prone to buy online.
Bing is the search engine of choice for people researching brands. Around 41% of users discovered a brand they like through Bing, which is a good enough reason to sell your kidneys on the black market and invest the money into promoting your brand.
As a whole, Bing users may be considered a bit more sophisticated. About 1/3 of its audience is with higher education, but what really matters is that statistically, bing users tend to spend more money buying online than on any other search engine, as long as we don't consider Amazon a search engine, of course.
Bing Ads is the platform to go if you are offering products for children or parents since 57% of all users have children in their household.
3. Bing Ads Has Lower Competition And Higher ROI
As I already pointed out above, Bing Ads is just an addition to the overall marketing strategy. Typically if you had to choose between Google and Bing and where to advertise, you'd be a lunatic who invades Ukraine, thinking you will be seen as a liberator, if you chose Bing. That's why many small and medium brands with lower marketing budgets prefer to put all their eggs in one basket since Google's PPC campaign, when done correctly, may lead to some extraordinary results. This can be seen by the massive difference in what companies have spent on both platforms. While Google earned $144 billion from their ads, Microsoft only received around $8.5 billion. This lack of interest in advertising on Bing has its huge benefits. Bing offers far lower competition, which helps to lower the overall CPC. In fact, the cost per click is about 35% lower than what you'd pay on Google.
The more interested and involved audience that I already mentioned above, combined with the lower competition, is a recipe for success. The CTR in Bing Ads is much higher, drawing better revenue and a much better ROI.
It's like taking candy from a baby and then selling it back to the mom for a considerable profit—only less despicable and much more legal.
4. Bing Ads Guarantees Better Ad Control
Being on top of the market and practically owning the search engine market has taken its toll on Google. Mainly when we talk about their UX. Bing has capitalized on that like a tick, which uses his small size to exploit bigger animals' weaknesses.
Bing offers much better control from the ad's generation to its optimization and running. The set-up is as easy as finding an article in a US newspaper about a Florida man who has done something stupid or weird. Moreover, Microsoft ads allow you to simply import existing AdWords campaigns, which is one truly ingenious incentive. Why not run one more ad and get to over 10% of the US market when it doesn't take a second to prepare it, and it will cost you only when someone actually clicks on the ad?
Bing's increased control over the ad allows something that is extremely useful for those who have an international business - to assign different time zones for different ad campaigns. This allows some pretty advanced scheduling tactics to take place and increase your CTR and ROI even higher.
Furthermore, Bings opens much more possibilities to target more precisely your ad groups. The platforms allow for setting different networks, locations, language, ad rotation, and ad scheduling at the ad group level, making starting a campaign much quicker and easier. As a plus, you will have the opportunity to use free intelligent tools that will help you optimize your campaign and find the right keywords for getting the best results.
Finally, Bing has a mobile app, which gives you the opportunity to control your ads much easier while outside the office. Weirdly Google hasn't done this one yet. They insist on mobile-friendliness, but they don't have their own platform made into an app. For shame!
5. Bing Ads Offer Much Better Social Extensions
After the epic failure of Google+, the search engine king never tried to add any social media extensions to its Ads platform. Social media gives social proof to your brand, so seeing that you have 30 million followers on Twitter or Facebook tells the potential customer that your brand and your products are legit.
On the other hand, Microsoft knows that a brand is just as valuable as people perceive it to be, so they created some pretty lovely social media extensions for Bing Ads. They allow you not only to show how many followers over different platforms you have but also invite potential customers to check your profile and communicate directly through social media (something many people prefer).
Are Bing Ads Worth Your While?
There can only be one answer to this, and as an exception, it's not "it depends" I told you at the start that today is a special day, so this time I'm giving you a straight answer: Yes! Definitely! That doesn't mean that you should forget about Google Ads altogether. On the contrary, you should run PPC campaigns on both platforms and benefit from the pluses of Bing and Google.
Creating a campaign on Bing might be easy, but not if you want it to be highly successful. For this, you need to have a lot of SEO knowledge and experience to find the right keywords with the best volume, cost and quality.
The easiest and most efficient way to achieve this is to higher Locus Digital. As one of the leading Dallas-based SEO agencies, we have the know-how to create brilliant PPC campaigns both in Google and Bing and fine-tune them to reflect the specifics of each platform perfectly. So give us a call, and let's discuss your successful PPC campaigns.
