Breakfast With Bing
Breakfast With Bing

Breakfast With Bing

Last Thursday, the Reef Performance Media Team was invited to the Morning Tea and Lunch held by Microsoft Australia. It was great to hear about the ambitions from Bing, their product updates and industry insights. Also a good opportunity to connect and chat with industry peers about our online advertising journey.

As a well-known search engine operated by Microsoft, Bing has garnered enough attention to make a difference. Let’s take a peek inside the event!

So How Is Bing?

Market Share – Compared with Google as an alternative search tool, Bing might not rank as a must-have for some advertisers, as they say, Google dominates the market anyway. However, the market share of Bing has grown a lot throughout the years and the trend seems to be continuing. Apart from search, Bing is ramping up its game by launching Windows 10 and partnering with giant platforms such as Amazon, Yahoo and Apple. You would be surprised to hear that searches on Amazon and Siri are, in fact, powered by Bing.

Marketers love numbers (or pretend to), so let’s have a look at some:

In the United States, Bing Network occupies 31% of the market. In the APAC region; Hong Kong (29%), Taiwan (34%) and Australia (11%) are the top three markets. In this light, it doesn’t just makes sense to advertise on Bing, it almost becomes a necessity if you want to achieve your business goals in those markets.

Industry Audience – Data released during the event delved into audience insight by industry, which furthered our confirmation of utilising Bing when we work with clients from the Technology, Business/Finance, Retail, Travel, and Automotive industries. The data also showed in certain industries that Bing users are more likely to convert compared with Google users.

Bing
Source: Microsoft Internal Data, January 2016

New Features of Interface – Recently released features included Callout and Review Extensions, Multi Account Bulk Upload, Product Ads, and Keyword Planner V2. The high similarity between the interfaces of Bing Ads and Google AdWords makes it easy for transferring already-built campaigns, as well as ongoing optimisations. There are also a few differentiators, among which my favorites are Campaign Planner that reads industry benchmarks,competitive landscapes, and allows you to see Quality Score at the campaign level. They enable the macro-level metrics for us to optimise the accounts, adding more measurement for decision making.

Getting Down to Business

As experienced investors would advise you, the best practice is diversifying your portfolios. At Reef, it is highly recommended that businesses allocate part of their advertising budget into Bing Ads in order to achieve maximised ROI. PPCHERO.com details 25 Reasons to Use Bing Ads Now, but here I’m just going to mention two points that outline why it makes sense to have Bing in your marketing plan:

  • Be Found by Your Customers – As simple as that. In today’s ever-changing landscape of online advertising, people’s attention is the true gold. So instead of going all into one platform or following trends blindly, the only truth we should hold on to is to go wherever your customers are. Know your business, analyse your customers, and find them on the right platforms. If 20% of your customers are on Bing, be there, be found.
  • Better Return On Investment – In many cases, Bing ads have achieved a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) with a lower Cost-Per-Click (CPC), making better usage of advertising budgets. The less competition also makes Bing a desirable channel for small to medium businesses.

For instance, one of our clients achieved 5.62% more CTR and $3.08 less CPC in May.
BING EDIT
GOOGLE EDIT

The impact of Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn on the advertising landscape is yet to be found, but Bing is definitely a channel worth experimenting on. As it is and always will be, the advertising channels need to be aligned with your business goals, whichever suit you the best will become your champion. To learn more about how Bing Ads can help your business, get in touch with me and the Reef PPC team!

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