How to Setup Great Bing Campaigns
By: Trapica Content Team
Tags: Marketing, Bing Ads, Advertising, Adwords, Facebook Marketing

If you’re like many businesses this year, you’re starting to realize that more search engines exist rather than just Google. Alternatively, you may have just realized that Bing’s small market share doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t worth an investment. Either way, you’re on our article hoping to learn more about creating great ad campaigns on the platform. Well, we’re happy to oblige!

Benefits of Advertising on Bing

Before spending any money, you’re probably wondering why you should advertise on Bing if you’re already advertising on Google. Don’t you already have the search engine niche covered? Not necessarily, and this is because Bing receives 12 billion monthly search requests from over one billion unique users.

We’ll give you a moment to process these numbers because we know they will come as quite a surprise. For many years, you’ve been told to focus on Google because all other search engines are irrelevant. In 2022, Google might have an 87% market share in the search engine niche but the 6% owned by Bing is still enough to add value to your marketing strategy.

What’s more, around one billion people use Windows 10 and Bing is the default search engine on all these devices. The internet will continually tell you that Bing’s market share is tiny compared to Google’s market share, and this is true. By ignoring Bing, however, you’re missing out on lots of opportunities.

Another benefit of advertising on Bing is that the average user enjoys a higher click-through rate compared to Google (1.25% compared to 0.86%). With less traffic, Bing advertisers have less competition, and the cost of advertising also falls.

Just in case you aren’t persuaded just yet, campaigns on Bing don’t just appear on the Bing search engine. Instead, they will also appear on Yahoo and AOL. Now, you’re reaching 10% of the search engine market with Bing and Yahoo.

Creating an Ad Campaign

Step 1 — Set Up a Microsoft Advertising Account

Before anything else, Bing Ads belongs to Microsoft Advertising, so you’ll need an account with the latter if you want to launch a campaign. Don’t worry, accounts are free, and an existing email address is good enough to get you started. If you don’t already have a Microsoft account, create a new one to start your advertising journey.

If you’ve created an account for anything online before, you shouldn’t have a problem. Just follow the on-screen instructions; Microsoft will ask for your business location and name. Also, you’ll need to agree to the Terms of Service.

Step 2 — Import Google Ads Campaigns

We didn’t include this in the list of benefits because we didn’t want to ruin the surprise, but you can import an existing Google Ads campaign directly into Bing. If you have a successful campaign on Google that you would like to recreate, this could cut your task in half. Of course, this is an optional step because you may want to start from scratch, or you may not have any Google campaigns to copy across.

If you want to import a Google campaign, click on the top menu, and then Import. From here, you’ll have the option to import from Google and log into your Google account. If you want to import the campaign as it is, click on Start Import and the process will begin. For those who want to adjust the campaign, click on ‘Customize Report’ to play around with bidding strategies and other features.

Thankfully, Bing keeps this process simple for marketers. For example, you can import up to 10 Google campaigns at once. After importing, all you need to do is check over the details and then launch the campaigns.

Step 3 — Select Keywords

Next, you’ll need to select some keywords for your campaign — an important component of any advertising strategy, as you probably know. With the wrong keywords, the campaign won’t reach the right people (we assume you want to find people looking for products of your type!).

What if you don’t have any keywords in the business? Use the Keyword Planner tool in Microsoft Advertising; you’ll find this in a list of tools on the top menu. After entering your service, name, and location, the tool will suggest a list of keywords. During this stage, you’ll learn the best keywords to target your audience as well as potential negative keywords to avoid.

When selecting keywords, refine results to learn about trends, search volumes, and cost estimates. Additionally, think about the type of people you’re trying to reach and where they are in the funnel. Are they just discovering your brand? Are they ready to spend money? Depending on where the prospect is in the funnel, they will use different keywords, and this is something on which you can capitalize.

In keyword search results, you’ll see a few different columns including click-through rate, average cost per click, clicks, and impressions. In particular, pay attention to cost per click and click-through rate because these are strong determinants of success. If you already have a favorite keyword suggestion tool, don’t be afraid to return to this tool for Bing campaigns.

Step 4 — Create the Campaign

If you didn’t import a Google campaign, you’ll have a bit more work to do during this stage. When on the Campaigns page, click on Create Campaign and you’ll be asked to choose a goal. For example, those selling products from an online catalog will seek conversions from the campaign. During this process, we find that Bing offers strong advice for all marketers.

After this, it’s all about making the final few edits and reviewing the campaign before it goes live. For instance, you can choose customized parameters to ensure that the ad falls onto the screens of the right people. Do you want to target people at specific hours of the day? What age groups would you like to target? Do you have a specific gender in mind?

Step 5 — Monitor and Optimize

We’re now on a different platform to Google, but this doesn’t give you license to drop your ad campaign and leave it to survive alone. Like all other advertising platforms, success doesn’t come freely. Instead, you’ll need to monitor performance and continually improve.

If you want to check the performance of your campaign, look at the CPC and conversion rate. While the former tells you how much you’re paying for clicks, the latter focuses on the number of people converting. While the mind might automatically jump to sales, the word ‘conversion’ refers to the desired action that you want from your audience. For example, this could be signing up for a newsletter or completing an online form too.

On Bing, all the information you need is available in your account. When reviewing your campaigns, you can also learn about impressions, clicks, spend, and various other metrics. If you’re spending more than planned, you might want to change your bidding strategy or play around with keywords.

Tips for Bing Advertising

How do you succeed with Bing advertising? Here are some top tips to finish!

Import Google Ads

Over the years, you’ve probably shed blood, sweat, and tears to get your Google ads into their current position. Bing offers the chance to avoid all this trauma, so utilize it. Rather than starting from a blank canvas, import your ads from Google and enjoy the head start. As well as saving headaches, this will save time and your campaigns are more likely to perform from much earlier.

When importing from Google, remember that you’ll need to adjust slightly for the Bing platform; this includes the bidding strategy.

Understand Your Audience

Were you really expecting an article on advertising without mentioning the knowledge of your audience? If you want to master the art of advertising on any platform, you cannot do so without advanced knowledge of your audience. The better your understanding, the easier it becomes to target, generate winning creatives, and…well, succeed.

Automate

It might seem like a short word, but it opens a world of possibilities. Using the right tool, you can integrate Bing and benefit from the artificial intelligence and machine learning models. While you focus on other tasks, this technology optimizes the different components of your ad campaign. It looks for better audiences, more optimal bidding strategies, and more effective distribution of your budget.

Optimize Targeting

A marketer’s work is never done, and this is partly because there are so many different settings to tinker with to optimize a campaign. For example, you can adjust the audience, device, geography, keywords, time of day, and so much more. In fact, Bing actually goes further than Google in this regard; we think you’ll enjoy the customization opportunities.

Quality Score and CET

Finally, two important aspects of Bing are the UET (universal event tracking) tag and quality score. Don’t forget to set up the tag to track what people do after clicking on your ad. Meanwhile, your quality score will reveal how you compare to the ads of competitors.