When you start an aggressive advertising campaign, often times we start with just the lion’s share of the market—Google. Assuming that you’ve seen that Google Adwords has had a significant impact on your business, you are ready to start reaching out to the other advertising channels to garner the rest of the market share.
As it stands today, Google has a commanding lead as the search engine powerhouse. The most recent reports show that Google’s user base now consists of about 64% of search engine users. Bing comes in second with 21%, and Yahoo is third with 13%. In looking at year over year trends, one thing is certain Bing is slowly growing its user base and those looking to expand their advertising options should take a serious look at utilizing Bing’s advertising platform.
Bing vs Google
It goes without saying that Google comes first. While there are some aspects of Bing Ads that might want you to choose it over Google Adwords, until Bing has a considerably larger share of the search market, this would be a poor marketing and business decision.
Probably the most beneficial aspects of Bing Ads are that they are less competitive than Google’s, so it is easier to compete in the market. Not only does this make it easier to ensure that your ads receive more impressions or ad views, but they also have cheaper Cost Per Clicks (CPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). This means that you get leads for your business at a much better rate than you are getting from Google.
There are some advantages and features that Google has—being the market leader—that you can’t get from Bing such as banner ad campaigns or call only campaigns. But as Bing evolves, they will catch up and continue to add features like these over time.
Bing and Customization
Part of what makes Bing Advertising so great is the amount of granular control you have—there are ways in which you can use special Bing features to get you an edge over Google AdWords. For example, Bing has some location-related measures to consider. Most importantly is knowing that the largest customer base, where Bing Ads have the most strength is in North America. If you do not want to target North America, you may be spinning your wheels by advertising on Bing.
If you are going to advertise across multiple areas across North America, you’ll be pleased to know that you can assign different campaigns to different time zones, this is a feature that even Google does not provide.
Customizing Social
Bing Ads have better social extensions when showing ads. An example of this is that you can show your Twitter followers on your Bing ads whereas you can only show your Google+ followers on your Google ads (let’s face it, no uses Google+).
Bing As an Addition to Winning
If you’ve got a successful Adwords campaign in place, you’ve got a successful strategy. It is time to implement your strategy on Bing Ads and take advantage of 21% of searchers that you aren’t reaching – and reach them with lower CPCs and CPAs.
