Bing Ads - a review from a local-centric digital strategist
September 04, 2015
Bing Ads - a review from a local-centric digital strategist
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bing Ads
I work for a digital media agency. We use Bing Ads in conjunction with Google AdWords to expand our overall reach. Our entire team has experience using the Bing Ads platform.
- Bing Ads is good for buying incremental traffic on top of your existing AdWords campaigns. You can import your campaign from AdWords very easily using a Bing Ads import tool.
- Bing Ads is good for competitive markets where the avg. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) on AdWords is outside of the range you're willing to pay. Bing Ads CPCs are often significantly lower than AdWords.
- Bing Ads allows you to simultaneously place your search ads on Bing and Yahoo at the same time.
- The quality of traffic acquired from Bing Ads generally isn't as good as traffic from AdWords. Metrics like time on site and bounce rate reflect this when analyzing the traffic in Google Analytics. I attribute this to Google having better algorithms to detect click fraud and bots.
- Bing Ads essentially copies AdWords feature for feature, but they roll their features out 3 or 4 months after AdWords has already implemented them. It would be nice to see more innovation from Bing Ads.
- It would be nice to see Bing Ads roll out some new ad extensions and targeting options.
- Bing Ads allows us to expand our reach when targeting very niche market segments, such as a hyper-local campaign for a local business where relevant search traffic is limited on Google.
- For national, large-budget search campaigns, Bing Ads is at least worth testing. We often dedicate 15% of our overall search budgets to Bing Ads, with 75% going to AdWords. You can potentially drive a lower CPA on Bing Ads if you know what you're doing.
- Bing Ads has had an overall positive impact on our company as we often target niche audience segments where reach is limited. Bing allows us to maximize our reach for these niche audiences.
Bing Ads is nearly identical to AdWords. It's essentially a clone of AdWords, which is a good thing. Bing Ads will drive a lower avgerage CPC than AdWords but traffic is generally not as good when you analyze it in Google Analytics. I would rate the traffic better than clicks acquired by social media ads, such as Facebook Click to website ads, but slightly more expensive.