Bing Ads launched in Australia in July 2013 and now provides search marketers with the only real alternative to Google AdWords. Although it has a much smaller market share than Google, the Bing advertising network offers a number of benefits to advertisers, particularly as Bing strives to increase its share of the search market in the competitive Australian online marketing community.
Bing Ads should certainly be considered by any search marketers as a low cost way of reaching the remaining share of the search market not covered by Google. It’s easy to set up a new account and, if an advertiser currently uses AdWords, it can also be easy to import an existing AdWords campaign into a new Bing Ads account, as many of the features replicate those offered by AdWords.
Bing Ads reportedly has the highest value conversions in the industry, so that based on the assumed average Internet conversion value of $100, it has been calculated that an AdWords conversion would be worth $146 and a Bing conversion would be worth $192. Overall, Bing Ads is seen to have less than 5% market share of the Australian search market, but they also claim to have a loyal audience of 350,000 Australians who use Bing or NineMSN search and avoid Google search altogether.
One of the main advantages we have seen with companies using Bing Ads is that the average cost per click is substantially less in comparison to AdWords, and the cost per conversion is also lower, due to the much lower levels of competitor activity. Of course, the market coverage and the volume of traffic is also much smaller than on AdWords, but Bing Ads is becoming a valuable alternative for advertisers, producing profitable conversions from the remaining sector of the search market.
Bing Ads is also improving the services available to advertisers, including new features in their Intelligence Tool, which provides unmatched and advanced demographics for a keyword’s audience. Add-ons for the Intelligence Tool can now be directly installed in Microsoft Excel, providing advertisers with valuable demographic data. Another impressive feature is auto-tagging, which is now available in the Accounts and Billing menu option, allowing advertisers to track individual keyword performance.
The main weakness of Bing Ads, however, is currently the poor accuracy of city-level targeting. Bing’s software currently struggles to identify and generate leads from a specific city, with the company’s software only currently recognising an IP location at State level. Of course it’s still early days for this service in Australia, which replaced the dated Yahoo Search Marketing system, and apparently this glitch will soon be fixed.
If you’d like to know more about how Bing Ads can benefit your business, or if you’d like to set up a new account, please contact us now.