For those that don’t know, Bing Ads (now known as Microsoft Advertising or Microsoft/Bing) is the second largest search engine by market share in Australia. Google holds massive weight and brand presence / brand familiarity with the world and as a result anyone else is often overlooked – think Bing. For Small business owners who are time poor and perhaps trusting their digital marketing agency to take care of their advertising needs its often overlooked .
Why you might ask? As introducing more than 1 search engine can introduce additional complexity for the agency which can reduce their profitability! In this article I am going to break down 7 reasons why Bing Ads is worth it and why it should be an ‘always on’ channel just like Google Ads is.
Reason 1 – Bing’s Marketshare Has Increased Substantially in Australia
The first reason is simple, at the time of writing and according to Microsoft Advertising the current marketshare of Bing in Australia is 17%. That has increased substantially over the past 5-10 years I remember when their share was less than 5%. Back then it was a question mark, but today at that level of marketshare penetration its reason enough to be present and “on Bing”. Put another way that means 1 in every 6 searches is conducted on Bing – can you afford not to be present for that?
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Reason 2 – Microsoft Owns Bing
Many business owners may not be aware that Microsoft is one of the worlds largest companies and they own Bing! Bing Ads is not some independent search engine it is well backed and not going anywhere, so you should have confidence that its an investment for the future and worth the effort knowing it is backed by Microsoft.
Reason 3 – Traffic From Windows 10
Do you use Windows 10 on your small business PCs? If you do, you are very likely using Bing as a search engine and you probably dont know it. The reason is that PCs using Windows 10 effectively default to Bing. Its integrated to all the search functionality like the task bar etc.
Reason 4 – Strong Emphasis on Trust & Privacy
Microsoft as a company has always had a huge focus on trust and privacy – there are a handful of companies that have managed to keep this pillar at the forefront of everything they do. When it comes to their advertising business and search engine Bing therefore, they have managed to keep that front and centre as well. How often have you heard about Microsoft/Bing advertising having privacy issues? Like… never? So why should you care about trust and privacy and how a search engine will treat your data? Well, its exactly that, its your data.. We think thats really important and businesses are going to rely on even more on their own data into the future so it important to know its in good hands.
Reason 5- An Affluent, Educated & Older Audience Demographic
The bread and butter of any publisher or advertising platform no matter if its a small blog aimed at people who are into DIY or a leading search engine, is its audience makeup. What this means is the audience profile of the “users” of their site/assets. Companies invest in understanding their audience as its a great selling point when it comes to pushing their products and services. The audience makeup also is an indicator of potential ROI or value of an audience.
With Bing If you take a look through the audience data located on the Microsoft Advertising Australia website you will notice that there is a common theme around its audience being more affluent (essentially having higher income), being more educated (a strong amount graduating from college/university) and being older. When it comes to small businesses generally you want potential customers that have more money to spend, are better educated (as you could argue there is a link to decision making etc) and although the “older” aspect is a moniker Bing is trying to lose, you can argue for small businesses those who are more likely to transact with most small businesses are in older demographics.
Reason 6 – Affordability – CPC & CPA
This one is going to be different for every small business and category however with Bing having lower marketshare, and therefore also lower amounts of advertisers it makes sense you will generally pay less per click CPC wise than say Google. To break that out – Paid Search is based on an auction where if you want to be in position 1 – you should only pay a little more than what the top advertiser is willing to pay to be in position 1 (of course there are other factors like ad relevancy, quality score etc) but this formula still holds true.
To anchor this Instapage recently published a study stating that the average cost per click on Bing Ads can be up to 70% lower compared to Google Ads. Now if you are paying less money to get the same clicks on keywords vs Google, but are able to get the same conversion rate – then your CPA is going to be lower as a result. Several resources including this study performed by wordstream back this up as a common occurrence. Leads are the lifeblood of any small business so you need to be present everywhere you can get them for the lowest possible cost provided the quality is good also.
Reason 7 – Bing and Google are near identical feature wise
What you might not know is that the features on Bing Ads are near identical to Google Ads. In fact, it would seem that Bing tends to copy Google to stay on track. Why is this relevant? The reason is that this makes it easier for advertisers who want to take their advertising on Google and replicate it to Bing. Bing even has a feature called Google Import which does just that – literally import your campaigns from Google directly into your Bing Account so you have all those learnings etc that you can apply to Bing. Sure Bing might not perform the same as Google but that right there is a massive head start for your agency and another reason to absolutely invest in Bing as well.
Bonus Reason 8 – SEO is easier
If you have read this far, I want to give you a bonus reason also that is related. Now this is a a slightly controversial one but many old school SEO people will attest that getting results on Bing is a little easier than Google. In general their SEO algorithm is less updated than Googles and hence and this is a generalization that tactics that used to work on Google (and no longer do) still work on Bing. I wont go into the details too much worth researching, but in short don’t overlook the organic SEO traffic you can get from Bing also to compliment the PPC traffic. You should always be focussed on Bing Ads/Google Ads and SEO in parallel to drive the most impact on search.
Summary
Hope that you found this article useful and its given you some reasons to re-consider Bing if you tried it in the past, or give it a go if you have never tried it before. Again every small business will vary in results they will get but the above points suggest most would be foolish not to test it and see what results it can deliver.
