Tag: Bing

How to Set Up a Bing Ads Campaign

With more than a billion unique monthly visitors, Bing is a hugely popular search engine. Sure, it’s nowhere near as popular as the world’s biggest search engine, Google, but it’s an impressive and powerful platform in its own right.  

In fact, if you’re running a paid ads campaign, it could be a mistake to ignore Bing and all the possibilities it can offer you. 

With that in mind, let me show you why it might be worth launching a Bing PPC ad campaign.      

Why Should You Run a Bing Ads Campaign?

Depending on what you’re selling and who you’re targeting, Bing could be the missing piece of the puzzle for your marketing strategy. Here’s why. 

First, Bing has a 6.7 percent market share, making it the world’s second-largest search engine. That might not sound like much, but there’s huge growth potential here. 

Next, over 1 billion people use Windows 10. Since Microsoft owns Bing, they direct a lot of traffic to their own search engine through Cortana and the search bar at the bottom of the computer screen. That’s some easy, reliable traffic right there! 

Finally, according to a Wordstream study, the average click-through rate (CTR) for Bing Ads is 1.25 percent, while it’s only 0.86 percent for Google Ads.

Seems like it’s worth paying attention, right?  

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign

Ready to get started? Great. It’s simple to set up your first campaign, so let me walk you through the steps. 

1. Create a Microsoft Advertising Account 

To start, you need a Microsoft Advertising account since Bing Ads is now a part of Microsoft advertising. It’s free to sign up, and you can use an existing email address to do so. 

First, head over to Microsoft Advertising, and click “Sign Up Now” to register.

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Create a Microsoft Advertising Account

On the next page, click “Create One” to set up a new Microsoft Advertising account.

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Go to “Create One” to set up a new Microsoft Advertising account

You can either use an existing email address or create a new one to run your account. 

Next, simply follow the onscreen instructions. You’ll need to input some basic details like your name and your business location. Agree to the Terms of Service and create your account.

2. Import an Existing Google Ads Campaign (Optional)

Are you creating a Bing Ad from scratch? Move on to step 3. If you’ve already got a Google Ads campaign you want to run on Bing, this step is for you. 

First, go to your top menu, select “Import,” then select “Import from Google Ads.” Then, just sign in to Google. Go to “Choose Accounts,” select the account you want to import an ad from, and hit “Next.”

If you’re happy to import your Google Ad with no changes, name the imported campaign and click “Start Import” or hit “Customize Report” to tweak things like your bids and bid strategies.

Want to import multiple Google Ads simultaneously? You can import up to 10 at one time, and the steps are pretty much the same. 

Once you’ve imported your desired campaigns, double-check all the details to ensure they’ve moved over correctly, paying particular attention to your targeting settings, bids, and budgets. 

Make any adjustments as necessary, and you’re good to go.   

3. Choose the Right Keywords

Before you create your campaign, you need to choose your target keywords. Unless you choose the “right” keywords for your campaign, your ad won’t reach the right people. 

How do you find the perfect keywords? Well, you need to run some keyword research. Microsoft advertising has a built-in keyword planner to help you do just that. 

First, sign in to your account. Select “Tools” from the top menu and scroll down to “Keyword Planner.” You can then enter details like your business name, location, and service, and the keyword planner will show you suggested keywords to bid on.

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Choose the Right Keywords

To improve the search results, input any keywords you know you want to use and note down any negative keywords you want to exclude from the results.

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Use Keyword Planner

You can also check for search volumes, trends, and cost estimates to help focus your keyword research.

How do you know which keywords to go with? Stick with keywords connected to “commercial intent.” These are the keywords people generally use when they’re ready to buy a product or sign up with a service, so it makes sense to target them in your Bing Ads campaign.

Say you sell wine. A phrase you might use is “buy wine” because, unsurprisingly, most people using this search term want to actually buy wine. When you search for this keyword and related suggestions, this list appears:

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Use Keyword Planner, Sell Wine Example

While all the columns matter, pay close attention to the CTR and cost-per-click (CPC) columns. The higher the CTR, the more people click through the ad. Balance this against how much the average click actually costs you to determine which keywords might be best for your campaign and your ad budget.

There’s no need to limit yourself to Microsoft’s keyword planning tool. You can also check out Ubersuggest for other keyword ideas and use your findings to inform your ad. 

4. Create Your Bing Ads Campaign

Once you’ve set up your account and completed your keyword research, it’s time to create your first Bing Ad. If you didn’t import any campaigns in step two, or if you’re creating a new Bing Ads campaign, this step is for you.

First, go to your “Campaigns” page and then click the “Create Campaign” button in the middle of your screen.

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Create Your Bing Ads Campaign

Then, set your goal. Your goal could be, for example, conversions to your website, a dynamic search ad, or selling products from your catalog. The setup wizard walks you through the different options available. 

Next, simply follow the onscreen instructions to complete your Bing Ads campaign. Once you hit “Save,” your ad will go live. 

Before you finish setting up your Bing Ad, you can go ahead and set customized parameters to maximize your chances of reaching the right audience. For example, you could choose which times you want to show your ad or which age groups you want to see your ad.

Bing Ads - Set Custom Demographics for Targeted Ads

Setting up custom parameters ensures you’re getting the most from your Bing Ads. 

5. Track Your Results

It’s all well and good setting up a Bing Ads campaign, but you also need to ensure it’s bringing you the desired results! To assess the effectiveness of your campaign, you need to track two metrics: conversion rate and CPC.

Checking your conversion rate tells you how many people are taking the desired action through your ads, and assessing your CPC shows if you’re overspending on your ad budget. 

How do you track these metrics? Well, let’s start with conversion rates. You can easily track conversions by simply clicking on the “Campaigns” tab and checking out the number in the “Conv.” column.

How to Set Up Your Bing Ads Campaign - Track Your Results

From here, you can tell how many conversions you’re getting per campaign. You’ll notice you can track everything from impressions to your CTR from this tab, so you can quickly track whichever metrics you deem the most important, all from one page.

Similarly, then, you can view your CPC from the “Campaigns” tab. Check how much you’re spending per single click and confirm it’s in line with your expectations and marketing budget. 

If you’re spending too much, consider bidding on different keywords or amending your campaign somehow.  

5 Tips for Creating a Successful Bing Ads Campaign

A successful Bing Ads campaign is about more than just keyword research and metrics tracking. To get the most from your campaign and maximize your ROI, follow these tips.

1. Know Your Audience

Whether these ads work for you really depends on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. For example, slightly older and wealthier audiences may prefer Bing to Google, so if you’re selling, say, wine boxes aimed at middle-class Americans aged 45+, Bing could be perfect for you. 

The best way to know if Bing’s worth your time? Build a customer profile. Identify who you’re targeting and what they respond to best. 

Do you already use a tool like Google Analytics? Check your demographics data. If you trend towards a younger audience, you might not get the results you’re looking for from Bing Ads. 

2. Import High-Performing Google Ads

If you’re already running high-performing Google Ads campaigns, it makes sense to import them into Bing Ads. While you can, of course, simply set up entirely new campaigns, you’ll save time and effort by just importing your successful campaigns.

Not sure which Google Ads campaigns to import? Think about which ones are most likely to appeal to the demographic you’re targeting on Bing Ads and work from there. You can always remove these campaigns and import others later. 

One final point here: Just remember to double-check that everything moved over seamlessly from Google Ads to Bing before you go live. 

3. Improve Your Targeting

To get the most from your Bing Ads, you must ensure they’re reaching the right audience. How do you measure this? By pulling multiple analytics reports. 

For example, you could track segments including:

  • audience
  • time of day
  • device
  • geography

Say you discover you get the most conversions from mobile devices on weekends before 5 p.m. Focus on ensuring your ads appear most frequently at this time to maximize your conversions. You’ll get the most ROI from your budget this way! 

You’ll find all the tracking tools you need on the “Campaigns” page. 

4. Use the UET Tag

To track your conversions accurately, you need to set up the “Universal Event Tracking” (UET) tag. Why? This tag allows you to see exactly what users do after they click on your ad and visit your site. 

In other words, if you want to know whether someone bounces from your landing page immediately or actually commits to a purchase, you need a UET tag. 

It’s easy to set up. First, go to your “Campaigns” page, click “Conversion Tracking,” then “UET tags.” Give it a name to help you identify it. In the description box, enter your URL or website name. Save the tag you’ve just created.

Next, copy the code and paste it into the pages of your website you wish to track. WordPress plugins can help here.

Finally, add some conversion goals to your tag, whether it’s tracking how long someone spends on your website, purchases they make, and so on. 

The Microsoft support page has more guidance on how to run UET tags if you’re new to them.

5. Monitor Your Quality Score

Your quality score reveals how your Bing Ad stacks up against competitors’ ads. It’s based on three things: your CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Here’s what the scores mean:

Tips for Creating a Successful Bing Ads Campaign - Monitor Your Quality Score

In short, a low-quality score means your ads won’t appear as often as they should, whereas a high-quality score means you’ve got a competitive keyword and CTR, so your ad appears more often. 

To view your score, click the “Keywords” tab on the “Campaigns” page and check out the “Qual. score” column. Check it frequently to confirm your ads are performing well.

Final Thoughts on Bing Ads

While Bing Ads aren’t for everyone, they’re definitely worth a closer look. For many businesses, they offer a cost-effective alternative to Google Ads, while others might find it’s best to run PPC campaigns across both platforms. 

The only way to know is to try them out for yourself! It’s simple to set up a campaign, so consider importing a high-performing Google Ads campaign and seeing how it goes.

Have you set up your first Bing Ads campaign yet? How are you finding it?

How to Set Up Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for E-Commerce Businesses

Google may lead the search engine ranks, but they’re not the only player in the game.

Bing holds 11.22% of the global search engine market share. Compared to Google’s 72.94%, that may not seem like much — but with upwards of a third of US desktop searches coming from Bing (and Bing-backed AOL and Yahoo), it’s pretty huge.

For ecommerce businesses, that makes Microsoft Shopping Campaigns (formally known as Bing shopping campaigns) a killer opportunity to boost your bottom line.

NOTE: Bing now refers to all platforms related to their shopping ads by the Microsoft name. For example, what was once called the “Bing Merchant Center” is now the “Microsoft Merchant Center.”

Bing Does Not Equal Google, but That Could Be a Good Thing

Long story short: Your paid media strategy deserves diversification, and Bing is the place to find it.

Why?

Because Bing offers unique demographics you may not be able to target from Google Ads.

More than 70% of Bing users are over the age of 35. At the same time, nearly 40% of Bing users have a six-figure annual household income. The company reports a good chunk of their user base comes from the South Atlantic region of the US (which includes various states from Delaware to Florida, plus Washington DC) — but they also have a stronghold across North America, Latin America, China, and more. 

If you are looking for high earners in a particular region, Bing could be your gateway into a lucrative ecommerce market.

Bing has some other perks too, like:

  • Affordable cost-per-click: Bing competition is significantly less than Google, with one ReportGarden study sharing the average cost-per-click for Bing Ads is just $7.99, while the average Google Ads cost-per-click costs more than $20. Of course, this depends on the industry — but a 250% price increase is nothing to ignore. 
  • User-friendly design: You don’t have to be a digital marketing pro to use Bing Shopping (though you may feel like one after you’re all set up.) You can easily craft ecommerce ad campaigns across platforms (Google included) to reach a wider audience.
  • Targeting differentiation: On Bing, you can target the device (desktop, smartphone, or tablet), operating system, timezone, and more. (Google allows similar targeting, but the options are far more limited.) 
  • An in with major websites: AOL and Yahoo both use Bing to power their search engines. This benefit provides Bing shopping marketers with a combined 700+ million unique monthly visitors from these two websites alone. Additionally, Amazon’s Alexa currently uses Bing for web searches.

When used in tandem with Google Ads, Bing can diversify your paid media campaigns for all kinds of ecommerce products. 

For more information about paid shopping and product campaigns, check out this video and the eCommerce Unlocked series on my YouTube channel:

How Does Bing Shopping Work?

When a user searches a branded or non-branded keyword on Bing, they’ll receive a grid of shopping results from various ecommerce platforms, which are usually from big ecommerce giants like Amazon and small businesses with compelling offers and inventory.

If the user has their location tracking turned on, Bing will refine the results by adding products they can find locally.

example of a bing shopping campaign ad -- How to Setup Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for Ecommerce Businesses

Bing “hiking boots” search query

Depending on your layout, these ads might show up as a vertical grid on the SERP’s right-hand side.

As an ecommerce marketer, your Bing shopping campaigns can give you valuable real estate above the fold.

And it may just put you in contact with a whole new audience while you’re at it.

How to Set Up Your Bing Shopping Campaigns

First things first: Create your Microsoft Merchant Center account. 

You can do this by logging onto your Microsoft Ads (formerly known as Bing Ads) account, click the “Microsoft Merchant Center” button, and create an account. You’ll need to verify your store with a destination URL, which may take up to 48 hours.

set up bing microsoft shopping account

Once that’s done, follow the steps below. 

Create an Up-To-Date Shopping Catalog

A shopping catalog (or shopping feed) is where your products live. You can either import your existing shopping feed from Google Merchant Center or create a brand new one. You can upload any new catalogs to your Microsoft Merchant Center.

Import ecommerce product feed into microsoft bing merchant center account

When creating a new feed, don’t forget to set up all of your product attributes.

There are mandatory product attributes (like title, link, price, description, product identifiers, and more), but there are also some optional ones (like color, gender, material, and size).

Add as many as you can because this info helps you connect with users in your target audience. That will help improve your conversion rates —  which is always a good thing.

Create an Audience

Creating a custom audience tells Microsoft and Bing who you want to reach. Aim to create a narrow audience, so you don’t waste ad spend on people outside your target audience.

On your Microsoft Advertising account, head to “Shared Library.” Under the audience header, you’ll click “View Audiences.” This section is where you can lay out your ad’s plan of action once it’s live.

Create a Campaign

From your Microsoft Merchant Center, click Create Campaign. Then click Sell Products.

You’ll adjust your campaign settings, like setting priority levels for each of your Bing shopping campaigns.

Priority levels can be high, medium, or low. The higher priority campaigns take precedence, so set your important campaigns with a bigger budget on high priority while leaving your runner-ups on medium or low.

Organize Your Product Groups

You can organize based on various attributes you’ve given to each product. This feature helps with targeting.

Turn on Automatic Item Updates

This option ensures your ad prices always reflect your website prices, and you’re not advertising products that you’ve already sold. A new consumer isn’t going to give your shop a second look if prices are off or you’re promoting out of stock items.

Instant updates also help you avoid wasting your budget. 

Use Custom Labels to Streamline Audience Targeting

Head to the “Labels” on your product feed in your campaign editor. You can organize campaigns, keywords, ad groups, and ads in a way that works for you.

While it won’t directly impact your Bing ads, this does help you better analyze your campaigns and improve future targeting. That can boost future campaigns and help you optimize existing ones.

Need a more hands-on guide? Microsoft has a training course for newbies.

Tips and Plugins to Optimize Your Bing Campaigns

Why settle for average when your ecommerce shop can run the Bing shopping game?

Try these tips and tricks to optimize your Bing ad campaigns and maximize your ad dollars. You can also view my free PDF of Bing Ads resources.

Import Google Ads to Bing Shopping Campaigns

It may seem like magic, but you can import your shopping campaigns to Bing straight from Google Ads.

All you have to do is make sure your website is set up on an ecommerce platform (think Shopify and the like.) Then, ensure your Google Ads shopping feed and campaign are up and running.

Once you create your Microsoft Merchant Center store and verify it, you can import your campaign using Microsoft’s Google Merchant Center (GMC) Import tool.

import google shopping campaign into microsoft bing shopping campaign

Then, tick the option that allows you to sync the two platforms to keep everything updated.

Universal Event Tracking

Universal Event Tracking (UET) is a Microsoft tool that helps track the sales and conversions that stem directly from your Bing shopping campaigns. 

Events are consumer actions like clicks throughs, add to carts, and purchases. You can track which events matter most to you and follow the consumer’s path from start to finish.

This tracking will help you understand how much revenue you can attribute to your Bing ads. The process includes applying a UET event tag and short web coding to record the conversions as they come.

Use Microsoft’s how-to guide for implementing UET for your Bing shopping campaigns.

Microsoft Ad Extensions

To help businesses of every kind (including you ecommerce folks), Microsoft has developed a series of ad extensions for Bing shopping campaigns.

What are my favorite extensions for ecommerce businesses?

Well, since you asked:

  • Sitelink extensions: Sitelinks are a cool tool that sends ecommerce customers straight to the right page. Word on the street is that you can’t actively control these on Google, so take advantage of this in Bing ads.
  • Image extensions: Add relevant images to your Bing ad using image extensions.
  • Review extensions: Show average reviews for your ecommerce products, right on the ad.
  • Price extensions: List your competitive price to lure in consumers from the SERP.
  • Action extensions: Add a call-to-action to your campaign that’s clear, concise, and action-oriented.

Shopify Ecommerce Store Integration

If you use Shopify to run your ecommerce store, you can integrate it directly with Bing Shopping.

Use the Shopify app to streamline analytics and keep all your data in one easy-to-access place. 

Shopify is especially helpful for ecommerce teams who want collaborative access to Bing shopping campaign info. But regardless of how many people you have on your side, it’s undoubtedly beneficial for Shopify store owners.

Set up Bing Remarketing Audiences

Remarketing is a process that lets you target consumers based on their prior web actions.

Keep in mind, if you import Google shopping feeds over to your Microsoft Merchant Center, you can’t import your remarketing data. That means whether you’re importing or starting campaigns from scratch, you’ll need to set up remarketing audiences manually.

Start with your existing audiences in your Microsoft Advertising platform.

You’ll also want to make sure you’ve set up UET tags and coded them into your website. This tagging makes sense considering you’re basing it off of the customer’s previous actions, so you need to track them.

Once you hit the “Audience” page, click “Create a remarketing list.”

From there, create a tag and configure the settings as you see fit. And whatever you do, don’t forget to save!

Use Local Inventory Ads For Storefronts

Bing’s local feature is pretty cool. It shows your ads for localized product queries, including cities, states, or phrasing such as “near me.” 

So if your ecommerce business also has a local storefront, set up Local Inventory Ads to maximize reach. 

All you have to do is provide your shop’s physical location, upload and submit product info, keep your inventory updated, and enable your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns.

Conclusion

There’s no denying Google‘s prowess, but ecommerce advertisers should consider Bing campaigns as well.

Adding Bing shopping campaigns to your marketing repertoire is an easy way to diversify your paid advertising.

Is your ecommerce business ready for an adventure into the world of Bing shopping?

The post How to Set Up Microsoft Bing Shopping Campaigns for E-Commerce Businesses appeared first on Neil Patel.