These days I see myself spending quite a lot of time on Bing because:
- They deployed their new “Multi Channel Management” feature that completely screwed up my accounts and
- It’s actually been growing more than Google on most accounts since Google seems to have reached some kind of plateau in terms of performance/spend.
The opportunities are out there
According to some sources, Bing has about 10% market share and Google has about 85% in the search engine landscape. The difference is probably much higher for mobile devices… but I get 3 times more clicks/impressions from mobile devices than desktop on Bing since their deployment on the audience network which I find questionable.
(Un?)surprisingly duckduckgo.com is one of my best performing mobile site on Bing, but it’s such a pain that I have that one good performing publisher vs all the other trash I get from the platform.
This being said, one of the clients I work with, a desktop only SaaS, for sells about as much on Bing than they do on Google because the competition is way too high on Google but somehow, not so much on Bing.
We went from 10k to 100k/month of spend on Bing in the last 2 years or so, where Google stagnated more or less at 150~250k/month during the same time.
For some other clients, I find Bing to be great because of their surprisingly loose moderation vs Google which is an absolute pain with their Content Policy where everything is flagged as Clickbait because they decided so and it’s about a 25/75 ratio of sales.
In terms of CPA on these accounts, it’s disappointingly close to Google so it works out although I wish it were cheaper. It probably should be cheaper all things taken into consideration, to be more attractive.
But Bing is unreliable/full of click fraud/…
I read a lot of complaints about Bing – many of our peers say that Bing is full of trash and bot clicks and whatsnot. I don’t have these issues on my accounts, except the audience ads where the publishers are completely rubbish, but it’s a tiny bit of the spend so I don’t mind it as much. At least it’s rather transparent (that absolutely doesn’t excuse the rubbish traffic) there’s an option to exclude them I guess?
To be honest, today in the search (and PPC by extension) industry, I feel like I have to choose my own poison and it turns out I’m choosing them all because growth and objectives, but as I’m increasingly frustrated with Google, I find Bing to be refreshing in a way that it’s still kind of transparent, although very unstable. It still annoys me that they’re just copying Google’s homework 99% of the time by releasing any feature Google deploys a few months later.
I realise I’m potentially shooting myself in the foot by encouraging others to explore Bing since it’s going to create more competition but I think many of us are sleeping on it today when the opportunities are rather large. It’s only going to get worse/better (depends on how you see it, I suppose…) with Bing with ChatGPT: the question of monetisation remains as they’re definitely not going to let that $10B investment go to waste.
My biggest pain point today with Bing is the US-centric approach, but I guess that’s where most of the traffic comes from. Incidentally, from insider info, I know that they’re trying really hard to grow their market share around the world — they seem rather ambitious about it.
Closing words
It might seem like I’m promoting Bing but I have absolutely no tie with Microsoft or whatsoever, I wish I were paid for that!
I’m just honestly surprised at how many people shove Bing off today in the industry. Does it come from a misunderstanding of the tool, or a past bad experience?
There’s a lot of bad with Bing, but there’s really a lot of good, to my great surprise.
Are you advertising with Bing today?
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
