Lately there’s been a lot going on with Bing Ads. As I’ve said before, one of my favorite things about Bing Ads is their responsiveness to the community. After my last post about them, one of their community reps actually reached out to me personally, and we had a great conversation about recent changes to social media policy within Bing. And, in case you haven’t noticed, they’ve started responding to tweets directed their way. Thank you, Bing Ads! The community really appreciates it!
This week, the PPC community love went even further, as Bing Ads participated in a PPC Chat interview. Can you imagine Google doing that? Or Facebook? Yeah, me neither.
Anyway, the chat was informative – as always, there are several new things on the horizon for Bing Ads. I’m sure some will prove highly useful, and some not – but that’s ok. It’s the innovation we want.
One thing I really appreciated about the chat was the honesty that the Bing Ads reps showed. For example, one of the questions asked of them was (I’m paraphrasing here) “it seems like many of your new innovations have been copies of things Google has done already.” The response was (paraphrasing again), “well, we keep hearing that people want us to be like Google, and we want to give our users what they want.” I love it! Instead of feeding us some corporate PR BS, they told it to us straight.
Take a look at the streamcap, if you missed it on Tuesday. It’s worth a read.
That was the good stuff. Now for the not so good stuff.
After a nice run with the latest incarnation of Bing Desktop, I ran into a brick wall yesterday. I had gotten all excited and decided to build out a bunch of new campaigns in Bing by importing some Google campaigns. But alas, it wasn’t in the cards. I started getting all kinds of “duplicate ad” errors again, even on ads that weren’t duplicates. I’d had this issue with ads with the same title, so I was prepared for that. But yesterday, I started getting errors with ads that were completely different! I have no idea why that happened, but it was annoying.
I was finally able to fix the issue by deleting the ads that Bing told me were duplicates, and then re-typing them by hand. Not cool. And so, I didn’t get to upload as many campaigns as I had wanted to.
This is really the crux of the issue. It’s like we can’t spend money on Bing if we try. In this case, our client is looking for additional traffic & exposure, and I was hoping to use Bing for some of that – but no dice.
On the plus side, the Bing Ads folks on Twitter were helpful and responsive when I complained about the trouble I was having. I’m crossing my fingers in hopes that the issue can be fixed soon. I’ll keep you updated!
Yeah, the BingAds desktop is a blessing and a curse all wrapped up in one. I am trying to remember if I had the same problem or something similar with the desktop when importing via Google.
Vaguely, I remember errors using the straight import from Google and then had to give up and bring in exported csv sheets from Adwords Editor ( you still have to move some columns and maps some columns but it was pretty solid).
On a side note similar to errors on duplicate ads using the BingAds desktop, I have to becareful when Copy and Pasting any item, keywords or ad groups or campaigns, because the software wants to very specifically make the pasted item as a dup and you have to rename the marked dup and not the original.
Well, cross your fingers BingAds keep hammering away on the software and take user feed back to heart!
– Matt
Hi Matt – yes, I’ve had the same problem copying and pasting ANYTHING in Desktop – it gets marked as a duplicate, even after I make changes. It really defeats the purpose of using a desktop editor when you have to manually create new campaigns instead of copying and editing existing ones. Very annoying.
I do know that Bing Ads is listening to us and are working on the issues – but I wish the fixes happened faster! This duplicate thing has been going on for a long time.