You may have heard the recent news that Bing Ads is rebranding to Microsoft Advertising. This change has come about as the search engine shifts its focus to personalisation and artificial intelligence.
Bing is owned by Microsoft and has three search engines — Bing, Yahoo, and AOL, so when you sign up your ads are visible on all three. Bing remains the search engine used in Microsoft products, such as the Windows operating system.
Sponsored Products were also announced in the recent update. This will allow manufacturers to promote their products in shopping campaigns with their retailer partners. Currently, it is in beta in the US only.
Bing still has a large reach and is therefore worth investing in. Some Bing stats include:
- Bing now has 34% of the desktop search engine market share worldwide
- There are 5.4 billion monthly searches conducted on the Bing Network.
- 136 million unique searchers use the Bing Network
Here at Avvio we have long been advocates of Bing and our customers use its paid search platform with great results. The reality is that it will never bring the volumes of bookings that Google does but we feel strongly that it plays an important role in any digital strategy. Almost 100 of our digital customers use Bing with great success and that figure is increasing monthly. We find it particularly effective for targeting the US market who have a higher usage of Bing than in Europe.
The key reasons to include Bing in your digital strategy:
- It has a low cost per acquisition (CPA). In 2019 YTD our customer’s average CPA for Bing bookings was 6.6% or a 15:1 ROI. That level of return is difficult to achieve anywhere else. It also typically has a lower average cost per click than Google due to less competition.
- The OTA’s are mirror marketing your property on Bing, the same as they are on Google and therefore you must have a presence on it to ensure they don’t divert your intended booker away from your direct channel.
- It gives access to a more mature and educated demographic, an important audience when it comes to travel and hotel bookings.*
- You can import your Google Ads campaign directly into Bing. It takes all of the hard work out of having to build a new campaign and means you can turn it on quickly and start getting conversions.
- Bing allows you to:
- Opt out of desktop and focus only on mobile if desired.
- Change your settings like language, location and ad scheduling at ad group level rather than campaign level.
- Assign certain campaigns to certain time zones.
Bing is a great opportunity for those in the travel industry and as a bonus, it is quick and easy to set up with a Google import. If budgets are tight we would at a minimum recommend protecting your brand name with a campaign to counteract the OTA’s. Bing is a channel we will continue to expand for our customers and one where we see value as part of a wider digital strategy. As always please contact us if you have any questions around your digital strategy.
*Source: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/insights/planning-tools/bing-network-audience
