1. Home
  2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools
  3. Microsoft Advertising Reviews
  4. User Review of Microsoft Advertising
A Decent Way To Fill The SEM Gap
February 01, 2019

A Decent Way To Fill The SEM Gap

Brittany Goodman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bing Ads

We use Bing Ads as a complementary SEM Solution alongside Google Ads. We run ongoing text ads and put a moderate budget towards it. Bing Ads is currently only being used by the marketing department in our company but helps us reach the few customers who do not rely on Google when searching for relevant terms.
  • Easy to set up ads. The process of creating text ads is very similar to Google and can be done in just a few minutes without a lot of prior SEM knowledge.
  • Easy to understand analytics suite. All the data we need for deciding if a campaign is successful is easily accessible.
  • Bing is always giving suggestions on how to improve your ads, which are actually rather helpful rather than gimmicky or just trying to increase your budget. The Keyword suggestions are particularly helpful.
  • Tracking is not supported on a lot of backend platforms. We have had quite a few issues getting the tracking set up because there's no simple way of adding the code to Shopify and Recurly (our two purchasing platforms).
  • Support is mostly just sales in disguise. We've never had much luck getting hold of a support tech who can help us with issues, instead the conversations I've had always ended with "spend more money with us."
  • The analytics suite is not quite as appealing or user-friendly as Google's. It takes a bit more searching to find all the custom analytics you may need.
  • Unfortunately Bing is just not as popular a platform, so campaign traffic and ROI tends to be lower than when we use other SEM and paid marketing solutions (Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc...).
  • A small increase in ROI, and reaching a customer base that we usually don't reach with Google Ads.
  • Unfortunately, we still don't have very accurate tracking as Bing Ads isn't easily supported by our sales platforms.
I would place Bing Ads underneath Google in terms of return and ease of use. Currently, we use both, but if I had to choose I would put my budget on Google over Bing.
[Well suited for] when you want to fill in the gaps in your Google Search traffic. Bing is typically the second biggest search platform and has loyal users who should always be considered when creating a marketing campaign. I would not use Bing as my sole SEM marketing strategy though, as bypassing Google in favor of Bing would be foolish.