Do Bing Ads Work?

When it comes to PPC advertising, yes they do. Bing Ads do work well in certain situations and are a viable option to use alongside Google. You can't get away from the fact that Google AdWords has the biggest market share, so we recommend running both networks to reach more searchers.

What are Microsoft Bing Ads? - The History

Bing Ads were formerly known as Microsoft adCenter (aka MSN adCenter) and were a product of the Microsoft corporation. Originally very popular in the USA, their pay-per-click (PPC) adverts grew in popularity across the internet. They became one of the "big"three PPC networks, which also included Yahoo and Google at the time.

Bing and Yahoo later merged, with the Yahoo name being swallowed up into Bing. The latest statistics suggest that Bing still retains a 29% market share in the USA, but elsewhere this is much lower.

Unfortunately for Microsoft and Bing, Google came along and started dominating the organic search world and the pay-per-click arena. However, you should not think of Bing as Google’s poor mans alternative. In some ways, Bing can actually out-perform Google and get your company in front of people who do not use Google by default.

Here are some of the reasons you should consider running PPC campaigns on Bing:

Bing Is Less Competitive

Because less businesses advertise on Bing, it is less competitive. This is a big advantage. As PPC is primarily a bidding system - those paying the largest amounts receive the highest positions, which results in their adverts being seen by more users.

With fewer marketers advertising on Bing, there is less competition for these prime ad positions - that means you don't have to pay as much to secure a prominent space. That in turn means that you will get more customers for a cheaper amount.

This all makes Bing a good choice for smaller businesses who don't have big budgets.

Bing Has More Precise Targeting

Bing offers further advantages in that it gives you more control over the manner in which targeting works.

The Bing platform enables you to select different time zones for different campaigns. This allows you to adopt and manage sophisticated international ad scheduling strategies far easier than in Google Ads.

People still use a variety of devices, from mobiles, tablets to desktops. Bing allows you to target your ads more precisely to only people using tablets and smartphones. At advanced levels of targeting, you can even target mobile devices by specific operating systems.

This is very useful if you combine it with location targeting. It will allow you to target people  as they are literally out in the street looking for place to stay, eat or shop.

When it comes to advertising on Bing's partner network, they trump Google here. Bing allows users the capability of just targeting Bing and Yahoo, just their search partners, or both. Whereas, with Google you are limited to target Google search, or target Google search and search partners.

At the moment, you do not have the option to be more granular with Google.

One more advantage that Bing has over Google is its ability to target your users based on their gender and age in "search" adverts. This degree of demographic targeting is extremely powerful for businesses who know their customer personas and have identified the particular gender and/or age group of the people who buy their product or service.

Bing Is Still Popular In The USA

As Bing still retains a sizeable market share in the USA, it allows you to get your business in front of those people who don't use Google. And as already mentioned, it is likely to be cheaper.

We have noted in the past that European marketers are so obsessed with Google that they often ignore Bing, especially if their business could advertise to american people.

Google and Bing both offer very good ads editors for marketers to use. So it is easy to export an existing campaign, which is proven to work in Google, and then import this into Bing. Thereafter, all you need to do is tweak some settings and set the country to USA and you can expand your marketing campaigns quickly.

Microsoft Edge Browser Comes With Bing

Like it or not, when you have Windows operating system installed on your device, it is most likely going to have Microsoft Edge installed too. As Windows 10 is the latest incarnation of the Microsoft operating system, it also includes Cortana.

Cortana is Microsoft's digital assistant, like Amazon echo and Google Siri - but Cortana is on your desktop rather than on a separate device.

When you use Microsoft Edge or Cortana to search for information or to seek an answer to a question, these go off to Bing to get the results. This increases the chances of your adverts being shown to a potential customer.

Of course, a tech savvy user can change the settings so that the default search engine is Google. But for most people, especially older people, they will use whichever browser (and search engine) comes installed.

What Next?

If you are using Google Ads to deliver your PPC advertising, it may be worth testing one of your best performing campaigns on Bing. Allocate a smaller budget as it should go further than on Google and watch how it performs.

I can tell you now, that it won't get as many impressions or click-through's compared to Google, but pound for pound (or dollar for dollar) it will convert at a cheaper rate.

Please share this post with someone you know who is running Google Ads, but has never tried Bing - you might become their best friend for doing so.

About the author

David Reid

David previously worked with Europe’s No.1 Marketing Agency & the World’s No.6 biggest Integrated Marketing Agency, seeing first-hand how £150 million+ campaigns are executed to create household brands. Now he is the CEO of YewBiz and is focused on helping small businesses.