If you haven’t used Bing for paid search yet, you may want to strongly consider this ad platform. We’ve implemented using Bing advertising for every clients who uses Google Adwords in our Agency… and have seen great results! In many cases, our click thru rate (CTR) is typically 2-3 times higher than on Google… while our cost per click (CPC) can be significantly lower as well!
The big reason that we (and other advertisers) have this success with Bing is because of the lower average CPC and better ad positions provided on Bing due to lack of competition…
(Wait, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. I don’t want to drive up my costs.)
One of the biggest factors to having success on the Bing search platform is managing by your Quality Scores.
What Are Quality Scores?
Bing Ads quality scores are rankings (on a scale of 1 to 10 – with 10 being the best) that help you determine where to focus your optimization efforts in order to improve your overall advertising return on investment. This score can be seen at a campaign, ad group, and keyword level.
It is important that you pay attention to quality scores on your Bing ads, because the higher your scores are, the lower your CPC can be and the better your ad positioning can be as well. These benefits will affect how much it costs you to obtain a customer.
Below is an illustration that shows you how to find your Bing Quality Scores:
What Makes Up Bing’s Quality Scores?
Here’s a brief video from Bing explaining what quality scores are and how they work…
Bing quality scores are determined by 3 factors:
- Expected Click Thru Rate (CTR) – how likely your ads will be clicked and how well your keyword competes against other keywords for the same traffic.
- Ad Relevance – how relevant your ad is to the customer’s search query
- Landing Page Experience – is your landing page likely to provide a positive experience to the person who gets there by clicking your ad
For those who are familiar with Google Adwords, this formula may look somewhat familiar. However, there are a few differences…
- One difference- your quality scores are determined by how well your ads do compared to your competition for the same keywords. The Bing Ads quality score is based on customers’ search queries and other input that matched keywords exactly in the last 30 days.
- Another difference – your quality scores can change depending on what type of match type you are using. According to tenscores.com, …”another important point is that Quality Scores can change depending on whether you’re using Exact, Broad or Phrase match….if you have a problem on Exact match, you’re going to have a problem on other matches, but if you have a solid score on Exact match, don’t worry about lower Broad or Phrase scores.“
6 Tips On How To Improve Your Bing Ad Quality Scores
Now that you understand what quality scores are and why it’s important to manage them, here are some top tips you can use to impact those scores…
- Personalize Your Ad – address your customer directly by using words like ‘you’ and ‘your’ and being very specific in ads. For example, use ‘50% off’ rather than ‘big discounts’.
- Proper Keyword Research – as with Google, Bing Ads has its own keyword research tool that you can use to help you build effective keyword lists. For more tips on how to find relevent keywords, visit http://help.bingads.microsoft.com/#apex/3/en/51011/1
- Manage Your Keywords – track how your keywords are performing every week or so. Delete keywords (and ads) that have a low CTR (especially if they also don’t have a good conversion rate).
- Keep Related Keywords Together – group related keywords and ads in their own ad groups and then create a unique landing page for each group.
- Use Multiple Landing Pages – we have a client who is a nursing school. They have different courses that they teach. When we first took over the account, we created a different landing page for each course. The relevancy of keywords matched the landing pages and our cost per appointment decreased dramatically!
- Improve Your Website – check the site speed. If your site is slow, then your customer will leave the page immediately, increasing your ‘bounce’ rate. We had an eCommerce client that had a 14 second load time for their site! Having them fix that issue cut down their cost per acquisition by 70%.
In summary, if you’re having success with Google Adwords, then running your ad campaigns on Bing’s platform make perfect, logical sense. The platforms are similar, but due to less competition, it’s easier to get lower CPC and higher CTRs for your keywords. Another way to improve your performance is to pay attention to your quality score. By writing quality ad copy and sending traffic to a relevant landing page, you can improve your quality score in Bing, raise your ad position, and reduce your overall cost per acquisition.
Nick Bridges
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