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Bing Adwords and SEO for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, are not very common online marketing channels in Israel. Still, the Bing Global Team invited some of the international digital marketing agencies in Israel to the Breakfast with Bing event, and introduced them to the Bing Network, the recent changes in Bing Adwords, future plans and its benefits comparing to the famous competitor.

As for November 2016, Google dominates 63.7% of the US search market (in desktop, home and work locations), about twice as Microsoft’s Bing share (31.9%). However, according to Bing, the search engine audience may be smaller, but bigger in spending: unique searchers on Bing Network spend 25% more than the average internet searcher. Bing’s global market share is estimated at 8.4%, and it is higher in countries such as Canada (15.7%), United Kingdom (23.3%), France (15.8%), Germany (12.3%), Australia (14.2%) and Taiwan (27.2%).

Additionally, the CPC (Cost Per Click) in most industries is lower comparing to Google.

Bing is also increasing its share in mobile search. In the US alone, 28% of the searches come from mobile devices across all operating systems: about 220 million searches come from Windows Phones every month, 300 million searches from Android devices and about 1 billion searches from iOS devices.

Bing search advertising is also evolving to meet with the users’ behavior in the mobile era and shifting the focus from keywords to buyers’ intention and users’ experience and taking advantage of advanced technologies such as programmtatic and digital assistants.

Some of Bing’s Advertising Updates in 2016:

The updated Bing Adwords interface allows advertisers to get insights directly from the Campaign workplace, download the data in the Campaigns’ page grids and compare performance metrics to previous time period.

New automation tools allow users to choose autobidding strategy for various campaign goals (maximize clicks or conversion, set target CPA), and by that improve ROI in Bing advertising.

The Multi-account management tool was designed for agencies and it allows them to manage several Bing Adwords accounts using one login, and offers several features to make it easier to share, manage billing, payments, budgets and users.

Shared Budgets is a new feature that allows advertisers to spend all of the assigned budgets. Meaning, you can set a daily budget that will apply to more than one campaign in the same account. If some of the daily budget was left unused, it will be reallocated between all the campaigns. By that, advertisers will have less unused budget, they will spend less time on dividing budget between different campaigns and improve performance for the most efficient campaigns.

Bing’s new and upgraded URL tracking method offers a simpler way to manage tracking by dividing the landing page URL to 2 fields: the final URL and the template parameters. Additionally, advertisers can set a unique URL for mobile users, so once an ad was clicked from a mobile device the users will be redirected to a mobile friendly page.

New Bing Ads Formats & Extensions:

Dynamic Search Ads: ads that draws information from the website’s content instead of using keywords. For example, instead of mentioning a sale in general, the dynamic ad would include detailed information about the specific products and discount.  Advertisers can set specific webpages and categories, and the headlines will be created dynamically using different matching keywords.

Structured Snippet Extensions: ad extensions that allow advertisers to highlight up 10 specific products or services in the ad copy, and by that improve engagement and CTR.

Action Extensions: Ad extensions that include a call to action button. Advertisers can choose between 17 action types (including Book Now, Browse, Download, Compare, Sign Up, Shop Now, Learn More and others), or create a custom call to action.

Dynamic Product Extension: a type of visual ad extension that allows advertisers to display products and services below the text ad.

App Install Ads: Bing Ads that encourage mobile app installation using an automatic detection of the users’ mobile device type and sending them straight to the relevant app store without wasting clicks on website visits.

Remarketing in Paid Search: Bing allows advertisers to create remarketing lists based on their website’s visits and associate those lists to the remarketing ad groups by customizing bids, ads and keywords.

In the future, Bing plans to add more shopping features to its advertising network, including product ads snapshots, merchant promotions, priced drop alerts and more.

If you have any questions about search engine advertising in Bing or Google, please contact us.