Are You Ignoring 68 Million Potential Customers?

Should Google be your first choice for paid advertising? Often, clients looking to break into Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising get caught up in the glamour that is Google Ads.

What they don’t always understand is that Google’s search engine results page (SERP) can be highly saturated based on the competitiveness of the industry, resulting in sky-high cost per click (CPC) and an overall discouraging PPC experience.

Enter Bing Ads. Almost 34% of U.S. searches are made on Bing.com. That’s 68 million users who aren’t seeing Google Ads ads.

Do I have your attention now?

4 Reasons to Advertise on Bing

Knucklepuck always recommends including Bing Ads in our clients’ marketing mix.

While Bing Ads doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Google Ads, it has learned from the competition’s shortcomings to offer these four features we think you can’t afford to ignore:

• More affordable CPC
• An easy Google Ads importing feature
• Expanded ad real estate
• Highly-targeted audiences

1. Less Competition & Lower CPC

Bing Ads are typically overlooked for having a lower market share, so they also feature less competition for advertisers. With fewer bidders taking on highly competitive keywords, Bing ad auctions are less saturated. This allows your Bing ad to rank higher than it likely would on Google Ads, and also to produce a significantly lower CPC.

As an agency, it’s critical that we get creative with a client’s marketing mix to capture relevant traffic efficiently and at the lowest possible CPC and cost per acquisition (CPA).

A lower CPC and CPA mean there’s more budget to capture additional traffic with. Bing Ads is a great opportunity to bid on keywords that might be outrageously expensive on Google Ads, but are much more affordable on Bing Ads due to reduced competition.

2. Ease of Use

Bing Ads knows they’re No. 2 in the digital advertising world, a position they capitalize on when designing their product. As the “second mover,” they learn from Google Ads successes and failures to make their product less risky for customers.

They also make it easy for advertisers to switch between the Ads and Bing Ads interface via an import feature. This tool allows you to import several data points in seconds, including:

• Bids
• Negative lists
• Location targeting
• Tracking templates with the correct utm_source

There’s no heavy lifting to launch campaigns on Bing’s engine, thanks to this feature. It’s as easy as clicking a button — literally.

3. More Ad Real Estate

Remember when Google Ads announced they were removing ads from the right side of the SERP and the whole PPC world cried? Unlike Google Ads, Bing Ads still offers both mainline and sideline ad positions, meaning there are more opportunities for your ad to show on the first page of the SERP.

Example of mainline & sideline ads on Bing SERP

There are benefits to both positions. Placement on the right side of the SERP provides increased visibility for advertisers who are struggling to land the top two positions on the mainline.

Bing Ads also offers a number of extensions to provide your user with additional information about your product, brand or service before they click on your ad. One of Knucklepuck’s best practices is to have ample, relevant ad extensions to communicate with the Bing Ads algorithm so audiences get the best user experience.

Bing Ads has many of the same extensions as Google Ads, some of which include:

• App Extensions
• Call Extensions
• Callout Extensions
• Location Extensions
• Structured Snippet Extensions

Screenshot of Google Ads Import Feature

In addition, Bing Ads offers Image Extensions, which Google Ads hasn’t adopted yet. Image Extensions allow you to display up to six images alongside your ad copy, providing your audience with a visual of your products or services. Image Extensions are also clickable, meaning you can customize where potential customers will be directed, ultimately better engaging your audience.

4. Introducing In-Market Audiences

In a recent webinar, Bing’s Purna Virji, senior manager of global engagement, announced Bing Ads is releasing a new targeting feature called In-Market Audiences. This feature promises advanced targeting options beyond Google Ads’ targeting features.

In-Market Audiences will use predictive intelligence to identify and target users who show purchase intent across numerous categories.

Table showing current in market audiences available in Bing Ads.

This is one of the most exciting features of Bing Ads, in my opinion, because the advertiser will not have to curate the list themselves like you would a traditional remarketing list. Instead, Bing Ads populates them automatically. This makes it simple to further reach Bing.com users and isolate them based on user behavior, thus making every impression, click and lead even more qualified.

Knucklepuck, Bing Ads & You

While Bing Ads may live in the shadow of Google Ads, the advertising platform is more competitive than ever before.

If you want a big “Bing” for your advertising buck (see what I did there?), you can’t go wrong with diversifying your Paid Media marketing mix to include Bing Ads.

Another way to diversify your Paid Media advertising is working with Knucklepuck. Our team of professionals have the expertise to maximize every dollar in your ad budget. Let’s talk about how we can produce a positive ROI for your business.