January 30, 2018
Last week, I presented a Bing updates webinar in partnership with Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft. There were so many new features to be excited about that I had to share with our entire PPC Hero community as well. Here’s what we talked about:
New Automated Bidding Strategies
In addition to eCPC bidding, Bing has added a few more options to their automated bidding roster:
- Maximize Conversions: Bing automatically sets your bids to get you as many conversions as possible. This is an open beta currently available in the U.S.,U.K, Canada, Australia, France and Germany.
- Target CPA: Bing automatically sets your bids to help you attain your average target CPA. This is currently a controlled Beta available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France and Germany.
It’s hard not to get excited about any new features that let the power of AI and machine learning take over to give you more time to focus on strategy within your account. My best advice? Embrace these features. Try eCPC in your accounts as a gateway automated bidding strategy, then test Maximize Conversions or Target CPA to see if they can help create efficiencies in your accounts.
Google Merchant Center Import
Anyone who manages a product feed is going to love this. You can now easily import your approved product offers from Google into the Bing Merchant Center. This is an open beta available in U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, IN, FR and DE. What this means for advertisers is that you can manage a single feed in Google and easily replicate it in Bing saving time and heartache. Please note that only approved offers will be imported.
Custom Audiences
Market to highly segmented audiences using data your client has already collected from their CRM. Here are a few examples:
Import segmented lists into Bing from your CRM and use them to send hyper relevant messaging to those audiences. Also, implementation is simple. Custom Audiences can be associated to adgroups as bid only, target and bid, or as an exclusion. You associate these lists the same way you would remarketing lists:
The downside to this feature is that currently, it only integrates with a few CRMs including Adobe Audience Manager and Bluekai. Also, you may not use purchased or leased 3rd party data to create custom audiences.
Multi-Image Extensions
This is a flashy way to get folks to pay attention to your ads. Five images at a time will appear in the order they were uploaded to Bing Ads. Every image can have an independent URL. Here’s the nitty-gritty:
- These will appear for mainline ads only.
- Multi-Image Extensions can appear with other ad extensions except for Sitelinks and Enhanced Sitelinks.
- Multi-Image Extensions are created with the same tool you now use to create Image Extensions.
- US and UK English – On Bing owned and operated sites – On PC traffic
You can get really crafty here and use these like visual sitelinks to guide potential customers to multiple parts of your website. CTR’s are likely to increase with the use of these extensions. Be sure to include high quality images and don’t shy away from using at least one logo to promote brand awareness.
In-Market Audiences for Search
This is the feature that I am the most excited about! From Purna: “Bing Ads predictive intelligence identifies users who have shown purchase intent signals within a particular category, including searches and clicks on Bing and page views on Microsoft services. These In-market Audiences can help you reach a group of high-quality, potential customers across Microsoft properties and optimize your campaigns accordingly.”
What appeals to me the most about this type of audience targeting is that as an advertiser, you don’t need to put in any leg work. You can layer these in just like any other audience targeting without having to wait to reach 1,000 cookies like you do for remarketing. Also, you are reaching out to individuals whose online behavior has shown that they’re ready to convert. Bing has curated a list with 120+ verticals broken out into uniquely specified segments. More verticals are expected to rollout in 2018.
Implement these at the adgroup level just like any other audience association:
Also, here are some great early performance stats of In-Market Audiences:
There is the potential to get really clever with utilization of these lists. For example, if you are a furniture retailer, you could expand keyword lists to include terms for people in-market for mortgage loans and use creative messaging to let them know that after they’re done buying their house, they can come to you to help furnish it. Also, layering these on top of remarketing lists or custom audiences has some very powerful potential.
Next steps? Reach out to Bing to get enrolled in these open betas and start testing right away.
