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Shady, Second-class Platform
October 23, 2019

Shady, Second-class Platform

Vincent Misiewicz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bing Ads

We currently use Bing Ads for a few clients at our agency, most of which have additional budget to spend. It is currently only being used by the paid media team, and for only select industries/business goals. There is almost always some type of additional opportunity for scale on the Bing Network, but must be approached differently than a Google Search campaign. We've seen varying degrees of success with Bing Ads, and can help improve the overall digital efforts in certain cases.
  • Familiar interface, offers editor for bulk changes, adding negative keywords is much easier than in Google Ads
  • Nice reporting tools within the interface, detailed reports can be made fairly easily
  • Had very nice tools to help import/export ads directly from Google Ads, which saves a ton of time
  • Quality of traffic is comparatively lower compared to Google Ads, very important to confirm at what networks ads are being served on
  • Average CPC can sometimes be higher than on similar ad networks
  • Less overall volume and avg lower quality can make it difficult to justify investment
  • Not surprisingly, branded campaign ROI is comparable to other search platforms.
  • E-Commerce shopping campaigns are very difficult to gain a positive ROI, even after implementing structures that have proven successful on Google.
  • We've seen very poor quality traffic from select Bing/Yahoo search partner networks, to the point where we requested a refund on spend as ads were showing on spammy link farm sites.
In general, Bing Ads as an alternative to Google Ads is pretty weak. As mentioned, while it does have its use cases, many times these are limited as well. With Bing, it seems like there is always a large drop off in the quality of traffic versus advertising products, which makes you question what percentage of clicks are legitimate. It would make more sense if the actual CPCs were significantly lower than Google or Facebook, but we've observed several instances where they were actually higher. Note that many of these keywords were highly specific long-tail keywords with what we would estimate as very low competition.
Support is very poor (not that Google's is any better), but it's bad. Can never hear what the reps are saying, bad connection, takes forever to get answers on what should be simple answers. Not the biggest deal as most analysts with 2+ years experience know more than the supervisors. They also do sometimes randomly call you to tell you about useless products/features. They're obviously just given a script and list of numbers and told to go at it.

Do you think Microsoft Advertising delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Microsoft Advertising's feature set?

No

Did Microsoft Advertising live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Microsoft Advertising go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Advertising again?

No

If there is a situation where you've reached diminishing returns on Google Ads and/or Facebook, Bing would be a decent place to supplement some budget. Also, if you're in an industry that has an older customer base, you're likely to find that a larger percent of users using Bing/Yahoo as their primary search engine, presenting a larger potential opportunity. Due to the average quality and limited volume, I would not recommend Bing as primary platform for Paid Search.