Bing Ads Improves Speed, Bidding, and Targeting

In a partnership with American Express, Bing Ads has launched a marketing toolkit to help its customers with Small Business Saturday next month. The toolkit – which includes printable signage and logos, free online ads, and sample email and social posts – is the latest in a series of improvements Microsoft has made to the platform this quarter in an effort to improve its targeting and bidding capabilities as well as its speed.

Because Bing Ads evolves constantly, the changes are sometimes so fast and furious that customers can’t keep track, says John Gagnon, Bing Ads evangelist at Microsoft.

“When we did the new [user interface], people would go through it and say, ‘Oh, hey, that’s new! That’s new!’ It gave people a chance to reengage,” Gagnon says.

Since August’s Bing Ads Recap, many of Microsoft’s enhancements have centered on speed. Bing Ads Editor is now twice as fast; downloading accounts, posting changes, and local bulk edits are three times as fast; and performance data is seven times as fast. The performance data is now available within 30 minutes of a user’s ad being shown, something that used to take four hours.

Other key upgrades include:

• Bidding: In addition to Bid Landscape, which shows how different estimated bids would have impacted impressions and clicks over the last week, Bing Ads now has inline bid suggestions, which tell users how much they would have to bid for an ad to show up on the front page or top position.
• Targeting: There are now more user controls for targeting settings, as well as an increased radius limit. “Geo-targeting isn’t sexy, but it’s super powerful,” Gagnon says.
• Top Movers Report: This is an optimization resource that allows users to check for variations to clicks and spend, and determine which campaigns are seeing the biggest changes.
• Campaign Planner: This helps advertisers identify trends, industry benchmarks, competitor performances, and keyword suggestions.
• Auction Insights: The feature reveals key performance stats for users and their competitors.
• Ad Scheduling: Allows advertisers to schedule their ads in 15-minute increments, rather than the several-hour blocks that were available previously.

“Since Bing launched Bing Ads, everyone’s wondering, how are they going to blow past Google?” asks Jeremy Hull, associate director of paid search at iProspect. “It’s a game of inches and I think Bing has done a great job building tools and features that are useful, and integrate into Google without trying to replicate Google.”

Hull notes that even when Bing follows Google’s lead, the platform adds its own features, such as the bid modifier optimized for tablets.

“I think the future is less about trying to get people to use www.bing.com and more about integrating their assets into however people are using digital as a whole,” Hull says.