If You're Not Marketing on Bing You're Missing 30% of U.S. Searchers Google is the dominant search engine but a remarkably large share of searches take place on often-overlooked Bing.
By Rocco Baldassarre Edited by Jessica Thomas
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When people hear that nearly 30 percent of searchers in the US use Bing on a daily basis, most think they can reach 70 percent of searchers without Bing or reach Bing users somewhere else. Wrong on both counts.
Turns out that Bing is a large chunk of the search market. In addition to bing.com, yahoo.com and msn.com, Bing powers web search on Apple's Siri, Kindle Fire, Amazon Fire Phone, Xbox, Twitter and many others. In other words, when you think you are Googling, you might actually be Binging.
Related: Bing vs. Google: Which Search Engine is Best?
For the vast majority of advertisers, Bing Ads is more affordable because of a lower cost-per-click. Nonetheless, countless businesses choose between Google AdWords and Bing Ads because it is generally assumed that they reach the same audience. Wrong again! The audiences from Google and Bing-powered web searches are different in multiple ways including their click behavior. In other words, you will reach different people with different habits who want to be addressed differently from Google searchers if you want them to convert from searchers to buyers.
Bing is relatively intuitive. You can import your Google campaign into AdWords in just a few clicks or create a new campaign from scratch.
How to import your Google AdWords campaign to Bing.
First, log in your Bing account (or create one), then click on "import campaigns" on the top right bar of your screen. Click on "Import From Google AdWords."
Insert your Google AdWords log in data and follow the step-by-step guide to complete the process. Considering how Bing has lower costs per click than Google, you need to make sure to tune up all of your bidding strategies once you are done importing your campaigns.
How to create a campaign on Bing.
If you are not looking to import a campaign from Google for whatever reason, here are instructions on how to create a Bing campaign from scratch. Begin by choosing your campaign settings. This is an important step because it determines the geographic location you want to show up in (or where not to show up), the days and hour, age, gender and much more.
Set your budget right here. Spend as little or as much as you'd like on a daily or monthly basis. A great strategy is to start small and grow based on the response you get.
When writing your ad you'll need to add a title (25 characters), the description (70 characters), the display URL (35 characters) and the destination URL. The usual ad copy best practices apply: a headline that is catchy and summarizes your offer plus a feature and a call to action in the description line to maximize your effectiveness.
Related: The Missing Element in Your Digital Marketing Might Be a Fresh Coat of Paint
Choosing your keywords is one of the most important parts of the whole account set up. It determines which search terms you will show up for. It's important to think at what stage of their buying journey your customers are in: are they searching for "buy," "reviews" or "how to?" If you are targeting sales, you might want to not invest into reviews and how to solutions while if you are planning to invest in a longer sales funnel you can open up to these other terms as well.
One of the biggest differences between Google AdWords and Bing Ads is that Bing allows for the separation of mobile and desktop devices. When doing a keyword research on Bing, you should therefore keep in mind what device your potential customer is using and whether you want to target mobile in a separate campaign. Mobile keywords tend to be shorter, so if you are looking to target mobile devices, Bing is one of the best ways to do just that.
Be careful with how tight you are grouping those keywords. A concrete example could be a campaign for dog toys. One group could be water toys while the other group could be tennis balls which would be a great way of getting started. Separating the groups even further by color, for instance (red water toys, blue water toys, yellow tennis balls, blue tennis balls), would take it a step too far in 99 percent of cases.
Setting bids.
The bid is the maximum value that you are willing to pay for a click. You can set up bids at the ad group or keyword level. The best strategy is to start low and scale up accordingly. Once you acquire some traffic, Bing will show click opportunities for different bid levels. This will make it easier for you to optimize this aspect of your campaigns.
Whether you are looking for new leads or want to open up a new sales channel, Bing definitively is a good option to test for your business. Try it out with a small budget and see if it turns out to be a profitable addition to your marketing efforts!
Related: Beyond Google: How to Optimize Your Site for Search on Bing
