Bing has been pretty active in improving its platform over the past 12 months, and many of the improvements that have been made to Bing have been designed to tempt advertisers who work day-to-day with AdWords into transplanting over their AdWords campaigns into Bing to avoid the pain point of having to do keyword research, structure building and ad copy writing all over again on a new platform.
The latest of these Bing updates is the upgrade of the Keyword Tool to the new Keyword Planner Tool, which adds lots of new functionality to for keyword research based on the Bing network, but also makes the interface strikingly similar to the AdWords Keyword Planner Tool! Unfortunately, this update is currently only available to US advertisers, with no word on when the tool will be rolled out to other territories. This is disappointing for anyone in Australia (why are we always last to get the cool updates?!?) who wants to do more with advertising on Bing, but having to use the old Bing methods of keyword research for now does present an opportunity of its own.
Bing is keen to show advertisers why they should invest their time and money into the Bing network; with research data showing that Bing is currently less expensive across almost all industries1 as it’s a less competitive marketplace, and that Bing searchers have a 44% higher than average spend for online purchases than Google searchers do2.
1. AdGooroo data
2. comScore qSearch (custom), June 2015
Zooming in on the last point, its not like using Bing automatically puts users into a haze where they become more susceptible to buying big-ticket items they can’t afford, so the most probable explanation for the increased spend of Bing users is that the demographics of the average Bing user is significantly different from that of the average Google user. With this in mind, just importing AdWords accounts into Bing wholesale might not be the most effective way to target and talk to potential customers searching on Bing, so, what insights can we gain from the keyword research tools currently available to advertisers outside of the USA?
The current Bing keyword research tool is limited in how much data it can offer, with only search volumes for the previous month offered, as well as no competition data for keywords. On the plus side, the tool does offer the ability to search via keyword or by scraping a website for suggestions.
One useful tool in the Bing platform which can make up for some of the shortcomings in the keyword research tool is the Campaign Planner. Belle Heidtman recently wrote an excellent guide to the Bing Campaign Planner, which shows how the tool can be a powerful source of competition data for a whole range of industries, as well as being a great source of new keyword ideas, with up to 12 months of search volume data available for keywords!
The main points in Belle’s guide are as follows:
Market Place Insights
Using the panel on the left hand side, you can select a vertical (e.g. Finance) to find relevant metrics such as search volume, average CPCs and device performance for that vertical. You can then select a sub vertical (e.g. Banking) to find more specific insights. To dive even deeper, you can then choose a product from that vertical to get product-specific insights (e.g. Online Banking).
Competitor Insights
You can have a look at who your competitors are and what they are doing by selecting the “Competition” tab. This will show you Ad Coverage and Average Position for your top 10 competitors. This data can be exported to an excel file for further analysis.
Keyword Insights
You can select the Keyword tab to view the top keywords for your vertical. For each keyword, you can see Search Volume, Impressions, Clicks, average CPC and CTR. Since there are multiple pages of keywords, you can filter by the relevant column, e.g. Search Volume or CPC. Alternatively, you can export the keywords so that you can sort through them and upload any relevant ones into your account.
Hopefully the information above has given you some ideas about how you can do keyword research to target prospects on the Bing network effectively, but if you would like more guidance, please get in touch with the Reef performance media team or let me know in the comments section below.