More than 133 million people search using the Bing Network. And even if you only start creating some ads to supplement your Adwords effort, Bing Ads are worth looking into. Step #3: Set up a Bing Ads account Once you’ve established that your audience is on Bing and that it won’t be too expensive to run an ad, it’s time to set up your Bing Ads account. You can now start the process of creating and testing a Bing Ads campaign. Step #4: Import your Google Adwords account If you’re already using Google Adwords, I recommend importing the information from your Adwords account. It will take all of the campaigns you’re running in Adwords and create similar ones in your Bing Ads account. If that’s the case, I still want to show you how you can do that effectively to test if Bing Ads are a good option for you. Using the audience demographic information you collected in the first step, set up your campaign to make sure that you’re targeting that specific group. Create a Bing account and start importing or setting up your ad campaigns. And you’ll never know if you don’t try.
Google is the King of the Internet, right?
Sort of yes, sort of no.
There’s really no doubt in most people’s mind that if you put the behemoth Google into a cage match with Bing, you’d probably see a KO faster than your search results for a local coffee shop.
But what most don’t anticipate is that you can also get a sweaty, scrappy fight that goes into the fifth round with a marginal potential for an upset.
Because Bing has some fairly attractive elements that keep them competitive and may just give you an edge.
I want to share with you how Bing can actually be a valuable place to run ads for your business.
And at the very least, I’m going to provide you with a method that will let you see if Bing could be right for you.
But first, I want to disrupt some of your preconceived notions about Bing by showing you what it’s truly capable of.
Where Bing really stands out
Advertising on search engines is nothing new.
But for newcomers to digital marketing, trying to find the best places and methods to advertise can be an overwhelming experience.
And then when you consider that there’s more than one search engine available to you, that just adds to the confusion.
When you start looking into the search engine you want to advertise on, there’s no denying that Google Adwords has simply got a bigger audience.
Most people would look at a graph like this, open up Google Adwords, and never look back.
They can run profitable ads for their business, make plenty of revenue, and never have to consider an alternative.
But that graph can actually be misleading if you just take it at face value.
While its true that Google has the lion’s share of Internet search activity, graphs that show market share don’t convey the fact that millions of users still prefer a different search engine.
That’s right. I said millions.
So what that translates into is that the reality of Bing is very different than what most people imagine.
More than 133 million people search using the Bing Network.
That’s almost half the population of the United States.
And even though it might surprise you, nearly 34% of U.S. desktop searches are on Bing.
So if you’re a marketer in the United States, you may be omitting one-third of your audience by not using Bing.
What’s more, it’s been shown that more older users are on Bing:
So if your target market is above the age of 34, you could really be missing a huge amount of potential business traffic.
And if that’s not enough to turn your head, it’s also been shown that Bing users tend to make pretty good money.
The vast majority of Bing users make $40,000 or more each year.
But the most surprising fact is that more than one-third of Bing Network users make more than $100,000 each year.
That means if you’re not advertising on Bing, you could be missing out on some of the most profitable leads your business could ask for.
And since Bing Ads are displayed on three search engines instead of just one, you get a lot more reach than a simple measurement of market shares might convey.
Specifically, Bing Ads are shown on the Bing, Yahoo, and AOL search engines.
That means that collectively, the Bing network is the second best place to put your ads according to market shares.
Almost 13% of searches happen on the Bing Network, which as we’ve already seen, amounts to billions of searches each year.
And for the most part, these ads will look and operate the exact same way they do on your Adwords account.
There are really only a few minor stylistic differences here, so you won’t be faced with reinventing the wheel.
You can use the same approach that you’ve fine-tuned on your Google Adwords to see if you get good results.
But even more importantly, it could be cheaper and more profitable to run ads on Bing.
The marketing team at Spinutech actually found great success on Bing with a lower budget for one of their clients.
That’s not just lower. It’s way less than half the budget.
And while a lower budget did mean they got fewer clicks, they also had a lower overall cost-per-click when they added everything up.
More notably, the click-through rate of each Bing ad was much higher than its Google counterpart.
So they spent less money, had a lower cost-per-click, and a higher click-through rate.
Does all of that sound as good to you as it does to me?
If your business can potentially mirror these results, it’s definitely worth looking deeper into Bing Ads as an option.
And when it comes to cost-per-click, ReportGarden found that the gap can be even wider than the results Spinutech came up with:
That’s less than half the cost to run a Bing ad than an Adwords ad.
That means by using the same amount of money on Bing instead of Adwords, you could essentially double your overall ad budget.
And while I don’t recommend rushing off to throw all your ads into Bing, it should certainly raise an eyebrow.
It should especially be attractive to brands that are stuck with enormously high cost-per-click keywords on their Adwords account.
It’s a widely shared fact that insurance ads cost the most money to run at a crazily high average of almost $55 per click.
But it could actually be a little cheaper, even marginally, for those same companies to run a similar ad on Bing.
At the very least, this shows you just how different the landscape of Bing Ads can be from the Adwords world.
Depending on your individual needs, it could be worth it for your brand to make the switch to Bing.
And even if you only start creating some ads to supplement your Adwords effort, Bing Ads are worth looking into.
So for the rest of this post, I want to show you how you can find out if Bing PPC ads are worth looking into for your business.
Let’s start with a little bit of audience analysis.
Step #1: Know your audience
The ultimate factor on whether you use Bing Ads just depends on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to.
For example, it’s a widely known fact that more people prefer Bing for image related searches.
So if your business is based on selling stock photos to other entrepreneurs, creating an ad on Bing seems like an intuitive business move.
Again, it just depends on your needs and whether your audience will actually find you there.
I recommend starting your Bing Ads evaluation process with some old fashion customer persona building.
Customer personas are the best place to start for any ad campaign because it tells you who exactly you want to target.
In the case of Bing Ads, you want to…
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