Last week, I had the extreme privilege of attending the third annual Bing Ads Next event. Bing shared their vision for the future of search, along with some big announcements. Here are some of my favorite takeaways from the event.
Bing Ads Editor for Mac
This is by far the top feature request on the Bing Ads User Voice forum, and has been since at least 2012. I had honestly thought it was never going to happen. But it is, and we even got to see a live demo to prove it! More on this huge announcement at Search Engine Land.
Extensions Are King
We saw previews of two new extensions. With Image Extensions, you can add an image to your ads:
As we all know, pictures help boost click-through rates, so this is a big deal for advertisers.
We also saw the new ActionLink extensions:
These reminded me of the Facebook call to action buttons, which are quite useful. These are clearly e-commerce focused, with limited options for B2B, but it’s a good start.
Bing User Preference
This isn’t a feature, but it’s super important. One of the biggest comments the folks at Bing hear is, “We get great results from Bing – there just isn’t enough traffic.” That’s definitely true for my clients. Bing is making strides, though:
According to these stats, more people prefer Bing than Google. Wow.
Bing Predicts Is Growing
I talked about Bing Predicts last year, when it was new. Now, it’s become almost ubiquitous:
It’s scary-accurate, and is something Google doesn’t have at all.
Cool Data on User Intent by Hour
We’ve all made assumptions about when people use different devices, and what times of day the “serious” searches are taking place. Well, Bing has real data on this:
This is a fascinating chart, especially the shopping portion. Great data to use for dayparting when launching a campaign, or when you don’t have enough of your own data to segment.
The Winding Conversion Path
The journey from initial search to purchase is a circuitous one, for sure:
It moves from device to device, and across multiple different search queries. The takeaway for me here was that you need to be present on all devices, and use a variety of keywords to stay in front of your prospects. Remarketing and RLSA don’t hurt, either.
It was a great conference in an intimate setting, and as usual, I learned a lot. To read more about the event, check out this post by Erin Sagin at WordStream.
I fall into the category of people for whom bing is simply not pulling the traffic to make it worthwhile tackling given the size of budgets my clients tend to have… except…. I have noticed bing works well for one client that targets the older demographic. I suspect that when they buy a new computer they simply get bing as the default search engine and are afraid to change it….
I think that’s true. We see more C-level executives coming from Bing and I suspect it’s the same reason – they don’t bother to change their default browser or search engine.
Great summary. So good to see you at this event, Melissa!
One of my biggest takeways is that as more users upgrade to Windows 10 and or purchase Windows 10 devices, Bing is going to gain search engine share and traffic volume from Google or query volumes may increase as search is integrated through Microsoft platforms. We will see demographics change, and CPAs depending on your industry may take a hit, possibly for B2Bs. Queries will also change with more voice activated search. It’s a very exciting time for Bing Ads and Microsoft in the search space.
Totally agree! We are already seeing signs of all these things. Also the way that users search in general is changing with generations, which will also result in change for us. Exciting times indeed!
Search space is highly dominated by Google and it is very difficult for anyone else to take much chunk. I see Bing is really going good now as I used it myself but still it needs to work more. I like that image insertion feature that Bing has introduced in ads.