Like Google, Bing is a web search engine owned by Microsoft. And Bing Ads is Microsoft’s SEM platform, where Ads appear in Microsoft’s SERPs and its partner platforms. Microsoft actually owns three search engines – Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. And when you run Bing Ads PPC campaigns, the ads appear on result pages of all these search engines.
Bing is currently the second-largest search engine in the world. It may be nowhere close to Google in terms of searches but still, it gets significant searches every day. And that can be hard to blindly ignore. So many advertisers include Microsoft Advertising aka Bing Marketing in their marketing plan.
Bing ads are somehow similar to Google AdWords (now known as Google Ads) in terms of ad structure and purpose. Like Google Ads, Bing ads are auction-based and rely on keywords.
If you want to run ads on Bing, you will have to bid on the keywords. If the biding gets successful, your ad appears on search results for that query.
Since it’s a paid advertising model, you’ll have to pay a certain fee when a user clicks your ad and reaches your website. And such fee for each click is termed as cost per click or CPC.
That being said, you’ll never have to pay for your ad to simply appear on search engine result pages. It will only cost when the user clicks on your ads. However, you still have to pay for clicks even if visitors click on the ad by mistake.
Being the most used search platform, Google indeed is the source of quality traffic and often bring visitors in a good quantity. That’s why it’s the most popular amongst the advertisers. Keeping this fact in mind, many marketers tend to sideline Bing Ads in their marketing campaigns. But in reality, there are tons of benefits of using Bing Ads, which can give traction to your business.
Bing has a lot of untapped audiences, on which advertisers can capitalize on. There are actually over 63 million Bing searchers, which are not reached by Google Ads. Leveraging these audiences, you can advertise your business and promote your business for the best results.
Bing Ads are often overlooked by most digital marketing agencies because of their low search volume. Actually, there is an advantage from the budget perspective. Due to low search volume and low competition on keywords, the CPC rate is usually lower in Bing Ads. This can help you achieve better ROI in your PPC marketing endeavor.
Google allows advertisers to set the targeting options at the campaign level. But in Bing, such options are available at the ad group level. This allows the Bing advertisers for a granular control on the ads.
Another major benefit of using Bing Ads is Ad visibility. Bing Ads appear in the result pages of Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and its partner sites. Also, the appearance of ads on shopping and financial verticals are quite eye-catching. Such ads usually encourage interaction.
Bing Ads have reportedly delivered higher click-throughs compared to Google Ads. And ad appearance is one of the reasons for it.