Search Alert: Acquirgy’s POV on How New Bing Changes May Affect Marketers

About a month ago, we opined (http://D4K.acquirgy.net) about how Google’s major announcement would affect marketers. Recently Bing (Microsoft) announced several changes to their adCenter, so today we present our POV on them.

The new enhancements at Bing include:

• New user interface
• Negative keyword match types
• Actionable insights with advanced reporting

New User Interface

Bing has streamlined the way changes can be made to campaign settings. This will allow us to serve our client needs even more efficiently than today, especially when there are a large number of changes to be made.

Negative Keyword Match Types

This important change will now enable us to optimize and manage keywords to a greater efficiency. When a broad match keyword is not producing the desired ROI, we can now “exact match” these keywords, so that we eliminate the keywords that are too general or irrelevant. This change will increase ROAS. This option has been available on Google for many years and we’re very excited that Bing has upgraded their capabilities.

Actionable Insights With Advanced Reporting

Enhancements in this area by far provide the greatest impact for increased SEM campaign efficiency. They are:

• A new tool that will help gauge keyword traffic, first page estimations and estimates of best position. POV: this enhancement will help us outline costs and better prepare us for when we launch new keywords.   This means a better handle on costs and the ability to make projections.
• Detailed status reports on warnings and disapprovals. This new feature gives us more detail on why ads have been declined. POV: this enables us to understand Bing’s evaluation process better, make changes faster, and avoid declines in the future.  We will get more ads approved, launched and generating revenues.
• Impression share report. This new report shows us data around missed impressions due to rank, budget or other factors. POV: this is a major enhancement because:
  • It gives us more information when we launch new keywords, leading to faster ROI optimization.
  • It tells us when there is more traffic that is available, leading to greater scale.
  • It helps us test a larger volume of keywords, which means we find more profitable search terms than ever before.

Increased Filter Customization

This enhancement enables us to locate and manage data faster. Like the new interface, this speeds up our ability to optimize our client’s campaigns.

Conclusions

While these changes aren’t as far-reaching as Google’s announcement in November, they are meaningful and welcomed, in that they will improve the efficiency of search campaigns on Bing.

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