Last week, Bing Ads unveiled its new automated bidding strategies: Target CPA and Maximize Conversions. These two bidding strategies leverage machine learning to make smarter optimizations, freeing up digital marketers from the time-consuming A/B testing process. To inform the strategies, Bing uses a variety of signals, including user location, operating system, browsing activity, search queries, time of the day, day of the week, and more.
Target CPA allows marketers to set their desired cost per acquisition — and Bing Ads then tests and optimizes its ad serving strategy to hit this figure. For added bidding control, this Target CPA allows advertisers to set a maximum CPC.
On the other hand, Maximize Conversions simply aims to generate as many conversions as possible, within a preset budget. Advertisers can set a maximum CPC for this option as well.
Source: Bing
Target CPA and Maximize Conversions are available for campaigns with at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days. But, as with all machine learning solutions, the more data you can feed in to train them, the better results you’ll receive. Therefore, search marketers who get data on all their conversions—including calls—will run the most effective campaigns. Below are some of the most effective ways you can leverage call analytics in your Bing Ads.
1. Track the Quality of Calls Driven by Your Bing Ads Campaigns
By understanding which of your Bing Ads are driving high-converting calls, you’ll receive a full picture of your ROI. You can integrate call data into the Bing Ads platform to optimize your spend for what drives the most business — online and over the phone.
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For example, let’s say you’re a financial services marketer and you run two campaigns — one for the keyword “Financial Advisor“ and another for “Investment Planning.“ When judging these based on online data, you find that “Financial Advisor” has driven 110 form fills in the past month, while “Investment planning” has only driven 75 form fills. Due to these findings, you were allocating more budget to “Financial Advisor.”
However, once you added call data, you found “Financial Advisor” drove a total of 130 leads (form fills and calls) while “Investment Planning” drove a total 160 leads. In addition, you found that “Financial Advisor” calls had an average lead score of 3, while “Investment Planning” had an average lead score of 8. In light of this data, you could then allocate more of your spend to the true top performing keyword: “Investment Planning.”
2. Personalize the Caller Experience
In a recent study, DT University found that 1 in 5 calls from paid search goes to voicemail. The conversion process doesn’t end once the caller dials in — to ensure the highest possible chance of acquiring new customers from paid search, you need to ensure the call experience is tailored to your audience’s needs.
Continuing with our financial services example, let’s say Caller A clicks on your “Home Loan” keyword. Rather than making Caller A wait on hold in a generic call queue, you can use call analytics to automatically route them to an officer in charge of home loans. And, before your loan officer even picks up the phone, you can arm them with valuable insights on Caller A, such as their name, geographic location, and the channel and search keywords that drove the call. The loan officer can then tailor their conversation with Caller A to win the sale.
3. Optimize for Search Keywords Callers Really Say
Additionally, you can use conversation analytics to identify the top words and phrases callers from your Bing Ads (and other channels) are saying. You can use this data to adjust your strategy and find new keywords to bid on. This strategy is especially important for voice searches, which often have a different syntax than traditional keyboard searches.
Again, continuing with the same example, let’s say you can automatically identify that 25% of your callers are using the phrase “List of Mutual Funds” when referring to the services they need. It’s therefore likely that similar callers could be using the keyword “List of Mutual Funds” in their Bing searches. To capture this audience, you could bid on the keyword “List of Mutual Funds.”
To learn more Bing Ads best practices, check out our Optimize Your Bing ROI with Call Analytics eBook.