Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads): Complete Guide for 2023- Key areas to test and optimize Ads

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Our PPC Advertising channel. It is made for beginners who want to understand how to use Bing Ads to grow their business.

As Microsoft aims to compete more aggressively in the ad space, Microsoft Advertising used to be called Bing Ads, so if you are looking for a complete Bing Ads guide, it is below.

You can check out our Microsoft Advertising video tutorial below. Microsoft Advertising used to be called Bing Ads, so if you are looking for a complete Bing Ads guide, it is below. The video tutorial will give you a step-by-step process for setting up your first Microsoft Advertising campaign. We will cover some best practices and strategies to get the most out of your advertising budget.

What is Microsoft Advertising?
Microsoft Advertising is an online marketing tool that allows businesses to promote their products, services, websites, and storefronts under Microsoft’s umbrella of search engines (more about this below). It’s a type of search marketing that uses Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to show users sponsored listings alongside organic search results.

Microsoft Ads can also be referred to as “Bing Ads.” In April 2019, Microsoft changed Bing Ads to Microsoft Advertising, while many digital marketers still use the phrases interchangeably.


How does Microsoft Advertising Work?
Microsoft advertisements behave similarly toGoogle Ads in terms of functionality. You bid on keywords that are valuable for your business, your ad is displayed when that term is searched, and you pay Microsoft/Bing every time someone clicks on your ad.

Microsoft advertisementsbehave similarly toGoogle Ads in terms of functionality. You bid on keywords that are valuable for your business, your ad is displayed when that term is searched, and you pay Microsoft/Bing every time someone clicks on your ad.

Microsoft Has Search Ads
Like Google, you can create Microsoft search ads that lead to your landing pages. Microsoft Advertising even provides tools to assist you in developing a cost-effective keyword list, so you never waste money on advertisements that aren’t being displayed.

Microsoft Advertising Gives Advertisers Options
You can also use Bing to create targeted filters that define where and when an ad will appear. For example, choose the mobile traffic option if you only want your ad to display on mobile devices.

Why You Should Test Microsoft Ads
This advertising platform provides you with a crucial opportunity. Its competition is lower than that of Google AdWords, and 54% of its consumers use the Microsoft adverting network for online product research. While Google AdWords remains a potent tool, Microsoft has significant features that make it appealing to small and medium-sized businesses.

Google’s hard push into machine learning and automated bidding – and away from more manually controllable optimizations – builds a sense of exasperation for experienced PPC marketers.

And it’s made some of us wonder if it’s time to reconsider a long-time little sibling of the paid search world, Microsoft Advertising.

In late 2022, Microsoft announced its ambitious goals for capturing a greater share of brand advertising budgets.

With such a promising prospect, let’s look at Microsoft Ads (or as most PPC marketers still fondly call it) in relation to Google – including advantages, disadvantages, and opportunities for the platform to make some gains in market share.

What advantages does Microsoft search offer overGoogle for PPC expertsright now?
There are a couple of major advantages Microsoft (and its search engine, Microsoft Bing) offers over Google as I’m writing this.

The first is an EQ advantage: I’ve found their reps to be reliable, helpful, and far less likely topush an agenda than Google’s reps.

This might be expected of a challenger brand that needs to work extra hard for market share, but it’s still a plus to work with folks who look for ways to achieve your goals and do what’s right for your clients.

Strictly from a growth marketing perspective, Microsoft has the unique ability to pull in LinkedIn targeting, which could enable an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy for marketers looking for ways to leverage tighter budgets.

Microsoft offers targeting by job function, industry, and specific companies. They don’t have full LinkedIn targeting capability yet (more on that in a bit), but you can leverage job-function exclusions and company targeting to construct ABM targeting for brands in your ICP.

Microsoft’s Search Partners network also includes DuckDuckGo, which gets some buzz even though – or maybe because – it’s a privacy-first platform and not an ad network.

If you’re interested in testing DuckDuckGo, you can exclude other placements in Search Partners to try and concentrate spend there, but you can’t actually isolate it for a clean test.

On the features front, Microsoft recently beat Google to the punch by rolling out video extensions, which complement action extensions and review extensions as nicely built-out ad features.

What disadvantages persist for Microsoft Advertising?
The first and most obvious is scale. Although Bing has closed the gap with Google in search engine volume over the past three years, Google’s volume is nearly 10x that of Bing’s.

And Bing is a little sibling in other ways. It tends to mimic Google with a few months of lead time. (For instance, the deadline for switching to Bing RSAs is approaching, and they’re pushing Performance Max-like functions for ecommerce brands).

In other words, most functionality released by Googleeventually comes out on Bing whether advertisers like it or not.

On the quality front, Bing has traditionally struggled to match the consistency of Google’s algorithm, which has been an issue for advertisers fighting to maintain control of their top keywords.

Recently, their exact match query results look nearly as good asGoogle’s and they share almost all search term data on all keyword types (~99%, compared to Google’s <80%).

If this is still a disadvantage, it’s minimal – and could actually become an advantage if Bing continues to focus on consistency.

When (and why) should advertisers consider investing and testing more on Microsoft Advertising?
In my clients’ accounts, lower levels of competition for keywords on Bing generally result in lower CPCs than Google’s.

While this doesn’t always result in higher conversion rates (in fact, those tend to be higher on Google), it can result in more efficient CPLs.

That said, the scale is much lower that the competitive CPLs alone don’t justify big resource shifts.

But Bing is a smart play in a couple of scenarios.

We always recommend keeping an eye on your brand terms to protect your turf. This might seem obvious, but there are lots of brands that forget that step.
Lower CPCs can help you get enough volume to understand what your spend is delivering.
I still recommend fully funding Google, but if you’re seeing a relatively soft month or opportunities to save budget from scrubbing lower-performing keywords on it might be worth testing Bing.
Overall, if you’re putting in a consistentinvestment into Google and struggling to improve or maintain returns, look at where return has dropped and consider scaling that back and re-investing into Bing tests.

Getting Started With Microsoft Advertising
Paid search advertising is a commonly used marketing channel. Though, when people think about “search ads,” we automatically think of Google. However, you should not forget Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads).

Before diving headfirst into search advertising, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the Microsoft version of Google Ads. Though they appear the same, both Google and Microsoft’s Advertising options have some benefits that the other may not.
In this post, I’ll be providing a beginner-friendly Microsoft advertising overview so you can start building the foundational knowledge for this marketing channel.

Where Microsoft Advertising Ads Appear
What makes Microsoft advertising incredibly unique is the number ofhigh-traffic areas the ad can appear. Instead of your ads only appearing on their primary search platform Bing, they’ll appear on all search engines, including:

Bing
Yahoo
AOL
With over 14 billion monthly searches on the Microsoft network, makes it an important marketing tool for sponsored ad campaigns. Additionally, you’ll also have the option to choose between the search engines. For instance, target them all, or select only Bing, Yahoo, or AOL.

Microsoft Advertising Keyword Targeting
When using Google Ads, you have multiple options available for accurately researching keywords to target, including their Keyword Planner. Though these selected keywords can be used on Microsoft Ads, it isn’t the exact data you want.

Instead of using this, Microsoft has its own Keyword Planner that pulls data from its network of search engines. Undoubtedly, you want to use this information because it could vary from search engines.

You won’t get confused with Microsoft’s option if you know how AdSense’s Keyword Planner works. Both are alike and more than beginner friendly.

4 Benefits of Microsoft Advertising
Throughout this post, we’ve suggested that using this advertising platform can present some benefits for marketers over its competitor Google. Undoubtedly, you’ll be surprised by this. Here’s what you need to know:

Cheaper Average CPC
Most marketers view Microsoft Ads as an afterthought, but they should consider it sooner. Microsoft Ads employ an auction dynamic like Google Ads. Thus, marketers on Microsoft Ads benefit from a lack of competition in various ways, including higher ad placements and lowercost per click.

A recent case study discovered that advertising on Microsoft was 59.2% cheaper than Google in some industries. Not only are these clicks less expensive on Microsoft, but the advertisements are frequently placed higher than Google equivalents.

Better transparency & control with search network
At the campaign level, Google gives marketers two options: target Google search or target Google search and search partners. There’s no middle ground or alternative. You cannot simply target search partners while excluding specific options or see which partner engines are sending visitors to your site.

Unlike Google, Microsoft lets customers target Bing, Yahoo, or all of them, at the ad group level. You can also run a report in Microsoft to check which search partners are sending traffic to your site.
Significant reach in the United States
If you haven’t included Microsoft Ads in your search marketing plan, you’re missing out on more than 30% of all search traffic in the US. Yes, the Microsoft network controls around 38.1% of the US search market, including Bing, Yahoo, and AOL searches.

As a marketer, you should understand the sheer buying power of consumers in the United States. Therefore, having such a large control over the search market could undoubtedly be beneficial to those targeting the region.

Enhanced Ad Control
Another benefit that Microsoft Advertising has over Google is that it allows for more control at the ad group level. Location, language, and ad schedule are all specified at the campaign level on Google.

Although Microsoft provides this option, these settings may also be adjusted at the ad group level. This provides marketers with far more granular control, which might be very beneficial for multinational campaigns.

If an advertiser wanted to run multi-lingual or worldwide adverts on Google, they would need to be set up in separate campaigns, potentially resulting in hundreds of campaigns to manage. However, on Microsoft, they can easily be built inside the same campaign, with the additional regions and languages managed using the granular ad group settings.

Where should Microsoft focus on improving to compete with Google?
Microsoft appears to be going all in on AI, given its recent $10B investment in OpenAI and its red-hot ChatGPT functionality.

If it incorporates ChatGPT into Bing search, as is rumored, it could instantly make waves for Bing as a trendy, user-friendly alternative to Google, helping it wrest away some market share.

On the advertising budget front, one thing I’d strongly recommendMicrosoft work on providing advertisers is the ability to create audiences from LinkedIn targeting.

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