Bing Ads

History

Bing Ads have already been running in the US and many other countries for several years and were launched in Australia and New Zealand at the end of July 2013, to a rather under-whelming press fanfare. However, this 'soft launch' now gives search advertisers another option to target the Australian market, although the new service is now taking search share away from the older established Yahoo Search Marketing system.

Bing Ads is partnering with Mi9, a digital media company in Australia that is a joint venture between Microsoft and Nine Entertainment. Control of the development and monetisation of Bing, Microsoft's search engine, moved to Mi9 in July. Mi9 hopes that it will bring renewed investment in the challenge to Google's dominant search platform by opening up cross-border opportunities for Australian search marketers.

Strengths

The format of Bing's PPC service functions in a similar way to Google AdWords. There's also the option to import Google AdWords campaigns into a Bing Ads account. It's certainly an easier platform to manage pay-per-click campaigns than on Yahoo! Search Marketing and this older tool is expected to disappear at some stage so that Bing will also provide the paid ads to the Yahoo! search engine.

Costs also tend to be lower as there is less competition here than on Google, so the cost per conversion can be beneficial. It's also good to have some increased competition in the search advertising market and another option to test and develop.

Weaknesses

This has yet to be seen, but Bing's search share in Australia is reported by Hitwise to be less than 5% and so volumes are much lower than through Google. Although there is still a good opportunity for companies to use this tool and to achieve additional search coverage of the market.

If you're looking to start running pay-per-click advertising with Bing Ads or any of these providers or need to improve the effectiveness of your current campaign, find out more about our PPC management service or contact us now for more information. Alternatively, please request a FREE website assessment and see what you could achieve with a successful search engine marketing campaign.