Introducing Bing Ads Part 1, CLICK HERE.

Bing The Massive Opportunity You Can’t Afford to Miss

And one last thing to consider is that Bing offers a lot of opportunity for the savvy SEO/webmaster. Why is that? Simply because Bing is lesser known and there are fewer people trying to rank there. Likewise, there are fewer people paying for PPC. That means that you’ll pay less per click and you’ll find it much easier to get to the top of the SERPs. Introducing Bing Ads Part 2 will tell you how.

Specifically? You’ll pay around 33.5% less on Bing compared with Google AdWords. In real terms, that means 33.5% more traffic, for the same cost!

Bing SEO

A lot of people never consider Bing SEO, and they don’t know what the key to succeeding there is.
That means that the 30% of traffic to be found there is ripe for the taking. It means you can do a little background research and then just swoop right in to get to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You’ll be in a smaller pond, but it will be much easier to get the fish biting.

Use Bing To Get Better In Google

And what you also have to understand is that this can then lead to more knock-on effects for your Google Ranking too.
Think about it: if you get to the top of Bing, then that leads to a lot of exposure to 30% of the web. This, in turn, means that you end up landing more backlinks and getting discussed in more forums and more comments sections. The same goes for paying for ads on PPC. You can use this as your ‘way in’ to boost your position in Google’s SERPs as well as to generally increase your brand without directly challenging the biggest players in your niche.

Eggs and Baskets

And apart from anything else, if you completely rely on Google for all your traffic, you put yourself at risk of something going wrong when Google changes its policies (which it does all the time) or should something go wrong with Google.
Look, this is a book about Bing Ads, but that doesn’t mean we have to be unrealistically biased toward Bing here. There are still plenty of good reasons to prioritize your Google AdWords campaign; the biggest being simply that Google AdWords lets you reach a bigger audience. But with that said, it makes a lot MORE sense to make sure you’re on both. The Google apocalypse may never come, but you should still have a contingency plan in case it does!

Microsoft Ecosystem

Finally, think about the kind of person that is likely to be deeply ingrained with the Microsoft ecosystem. Who is likely to use Microsoft software suites and hardware? Simple: businesses. That means executives, CTOs and managers. And that means they’re also likely to be looking at Bing. If that’s your target demographic, then you should strongly consider adding Bing ads to your campaign.

More Reasons That Bing Ads May be Better Than AdSense

There are more reasons that Bing might be the better choice for building an effective PPC campaign. For example, Bing offers superior control over ad campaigns in some aspects. For example, Bing allows you to set different ad campaigns for different time zones, allowing for sophisticated ‘ad scheduling’ strategies. This can end up making an important difference to your success – as in comedy, timing is everything for marketing.
Likewise, Bing allows you to set things like location and language for each ad group, rather than for each campaign. Bing also allows more precise device targeting, letting you set different bids for different types of devices. It also allows you to choose which search partners you want to work with, and it makes it easier to leave out variations of your search terms in order to create a more focused campaign.

And one little side note…

Oh and on one little side note? Bing is much better looking than Google. Those daily features images really give Bing a relaxing, and modern feeling and the animated ones, in particular, can actually be reason enough in some cases to head on over to the site.
Surely it’s worth showing Microsoft some love for that…

How Bing Ads (And PPC) Work

At the most basic level, Bing Ads work like Google AdWords. So if you’re familiar with the concept of PPC in general, you can probably skip over some of this.

Still here? Then let’s quickly recap.

Essentially, PPC ads are ‘Pay Per Click’ ads.

That means that you will literally be paying per click – paying for each person who clicks on one of your adverts. The reason that this is such good news is that you will never pay anything for a campaign that was a complete failure. If you create an advertising campaign for Bing and not one person looks at it, then it will cost you literally nothing.

What this also means is that you can precisely calculate the cost of each visitor to your site. This is important because you can then use that information to calculate how much each customer is worth and thereby start making very accurate projections of your earnings/identifying the best ways to spend your money.

Cost Per Click

So the next logical question is how much you’re going to spend on each click. And the good news is that you get to choose this. You get to choose your maximum spend, and you also get to choose your budget for the day.
First, you define your CPC or ‘Cost Per Click’ which is going to be the maximum amount of money you are willing to spend for each new visitor. You’ll probably want to keep this fairly low – the most that brands will generally tend to spend is up to $2 but even that is unusual. Generally, though, you’ll want to set this a bit lower, and your average will probably come in around 10-20cents.

The next thing to do is to set your daily budget.

Once the accumulated clicks you’ve received reach this amount, they will then stop, and you won’t spend any more money. So in theory, if you set your CPC to 20 cents and you set your daily spend to $20, that should mean you get 100 visits to your site for that amount.

But things get a little more complicated seeing as you don’t tend to spend the full amount of your CPC. That’s because there’s a bidding system that takes place which means you’ll offer to spend a lot less.

The way this works is simple.

If there are two or more adverts both competing for the same space on Bing, then they will enter into a ‘bidding war.’ The ad with the highest CPC will be the one that wins and gets shown. But the owner of that ad will have only pay the minimum amount that it needed to win. The easiest way to understand this is to think of it just like eBay – on eBay, you can set your maximum bid, but you’ll only end up paying $1 more than the next highest bidder. The same is true with most PPC campaigns, and that’s why you end up spending 33.5% less on Bing vs. Google – because the lower amount of competition means that your CPC won’t be as likely to get driven up.

In Conclusion

And of course, you also need to consider that your ads will be shown a lot to people who don’t click. You don’t pay anything for these ads, but that doesn’t mean they’re worthless to you because you’ll still be getting exposure and you’ll still be building your brand!
Introducing Bing Ads Part 3