Should I Start Advertising on Bing?
While working as a strategist at Omnitail, I’ve noticed most of my clients don’t even spare Bing a passing glance. They tend to ask a lot of questions about Google Shopping ads, but not have too many questions regarding Bing Shopping ads. Bing, however, is an excellent opportunity to expand your reach and meet your customers on a different channel. Through introducing and revamping existing Bing Ads accounts, I’ve seen the potential for profit that Bing holds. I want to share with you the top 5 reasons you should consider advertising on Bing.
1) Spend Less on Bing
Many customers tend to spend significantly less on Bing. On average, my clients spend somewhere in the ballpark of 10% of the total ad spend on Bing and the other 90% on Google. According to the Adstage Q1 2019 Paid Media Benchmark Report, Bing Ads and Google Ads have the same median CPC right now at $1.46. Even though they are the same, Bing’s click-through rate (CTR) is actually higher than Google at 3.19% compared to 2.72%. ()
Right now, you might be thinking, “But there’s less traffic on Bing. Does spend even pay off?” It really does. Let me give you an example…’
2) Opportunity for Profit
Let’s say for example a client runs ads on Google with an average of $35,000 a month in revenue. On Bing, that same client might make about $5,000. In the end, that’s 1/7 of the revenue for about 10% of the spend. That’s a pretty good turn around! As long as you’re managing your bids effectively, you can see this same type of return by running ads on Bing.
3) Reach Specific Markets
Many people joke that Bing is the search engine that’s only used to download Google Chrome. However, this is changing. In many offices, computers come with Bing pre-installed. Consequently, Bing has become the default browser for a lot of businesses. This makes Bing especially profitable if your client/audience is a B2B business.
Another demographic to consider is baby boomers. According to research from March 2018, internet users between the ages of 45 and 54 were most likely to use Bing. If your target audience falls within this range, Bing could provide you with more opportunities to reach your customers.
4) Bing’s Partnership with Verizon Media
With Bing’s partnership with Verizon Media, Bing has incorporated Yahoo Gemini (an ad platform with multiple formats including shopping, search, and display/native). In addition to shopping ads, Yahoo ads in general and AOL ads will all be covered by the Bing Ads platform. This is big news—we’re definitely going to see traffic go up from this partnership. In fact, Microsoft predicts an increase in clicks of about 10-15% according to SearchEngineLand.
According to the same study we looked at earlier from Statista, users 65+ prefer to use Yahoo as their search engine. With this partnership, you will now be able to reach those users through running Bing Ads! So that’s a huge added bonus as well.
5) Reach More People
Just because Bing is less volume, doesn’t mean there’s no volume at all. Bing still makes up 6% of the US market share according to Statcounter.com’s statistics for 2018. Your potential customer might be part of that 6%! Why waste an opportunity to reach out to them?
Final Thoughts
You’re most likely not going to put in the same amount of spend into Bing as you do with Google and get the same return, but any channel can be profitable if the spend is managed wisely. Know your clientele, know your catalog, spend wisely, realize the statistics of clicks, conversion rates, and conversions in general, and scale appropriately from Google to Bing.
Obviously, we manage bids often and with profit as our primary goal at Omnitail, so with a proper analyst you’re not going to see negative returns—there’s really no downside to advertising on Bing. Of course, you can lose money on Bing. You can also lose money on Google. It just depends on how you manage your spend.
Still unsure about how to manage your accounts? Reach out to us for a Free Analysis of your account!
