Big Changes to Bing Means Improved User Experience, Continued Growth

This past week our Bing Ads account rolled out the new interface. If you haven’t heard about it or already viewed the new interface in your account, it looks eerily familiar to another certain search engine’s ad platform interface (cough, Google). In my opinion, this is an excellent change to the Bing platform. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, isn’t it?

Improved User Experience

The new Bing Ads interface is more user-friendly and the graphs and dimensions give greater insight into campaign performance. By mimicking Google’s look and feel, Bing is encouraging advertisers to spend more time in the platform by making it more visually appealing. This is a strategic move on their part to encourage advertisers to spend more money.

The images below show a comparison of the new Bing performance indicator to Google’s performance indicator. It’s almost hard to tell which is Bing and which is Google.

Bing performance indicator:

Google performance indicator:

The Change History tab is much improved, also. It’s easy to see the date, the specific change that was made, the user who made it, and to which campaign and ad group. This makes it easy to track progress and understand which changes are impacting account performance.

The Opportunities tab is design to help advertisers improve campaign performance by suggesting keyword changes, bids, etc. It is also eerily similar to Google’s Opportunities tab. See below:

Bing Opportunities Tab:

Google Opportunities Tab:

Continued Growth of Paid Search on the Bing Ads Network

The new interface not only helps improve user experience, it also foreshadows the expected (continued) growth of the platform and its validity in the search engine marketing space as a true competitor to Google. Searches on Bing alone were up 10% month over month February to March 2014 to a total of 3.6 billion searches (comScore). With more than 3.6 billion monthly searches, marketers and advertisers overlooking the Bing Ads network are missing out on a significant portion of their target audience. 32% of the share of telecommunications clicks from the paid search industry occur on Bing, 31% of financial services clicks, 28% of retail, 34% of Auto, and more (see image below from their PPC Hero presentation).

According to a July 2014 Forbes, clicks on Bing ads are up 30% from a year ago, and mobile ad clicks are up 133%. Microsoft discussed the importance of mobile and local mobile search to marketers in their 2014 Hero Conf presentation and stated that on mobile they see a 20% higher CTR from mobile site links and that mobile conversions happen within 5 hours of mobile search compared to PC conversions that often take weeks to complete.

Since search is going mobile, on Bing and Google, driving billions of inbound calls to businesses in the U.S. alone each month, download the “Marketers Guide to Call Tracking for Local Search” to learn how you can optimize your Bing Ads account for mobile.

Big Changes to Bing Means Improved User Experience, Continued Growth