When it comes to online ads, Google is the clear favorite among most advertisers. Then came Microsoft with Bing ads. Over the years, Bing has managed to grow its user base to more than 116 million people, claiming 11.22% of the market share among U.S. desktop users.
If you’re a U.S.-based company, ignoring Bing and its advertising network means closing yourself off to a significant portion of your potential search-based audience.
Put in those terms, most marketers are eager to get on board and find out what they’ve been missing with Bing’s ad products — including how they compare to Google Ads, and how to leverage this technology to drive marketing ROI.
- How Does Bing Ads Compare to Google Ads?
- How Can You Setup Bing Ads to Earn Money?
- Pros and Cons of Using Bing Ads?
- How do you Make Money With Bing?
- How Much does Bing Advertising Cost?
- Is Bing ads Cheaper than AdWords?
- How do I Optimize Bing ads?
- Which Country Uses Bing the Most?
- What Percentage of Google ads are Clicked?
- Which Country has Highest CPC Rate?
How Does Bing Ads Compare to Google Ads?
If you handle search marketing in any capacity, you’re already familiar with how Google Ads operates, including its strengths and limitations. That offers an easy frame of reference for understanding what Microsoft Advertising has to offer.
Read Also: How Does Microsoft Bing Make Money
The differences between Bing’s and Google’s ad platforms are best broken down by analyzing the platforms from two different perspectives: the user base, or audience, and the function of the platform itself. Let’s look at each to understand what Bing offers marketers.
The audience
In terms of size, Bing’s advertising network is much smaller than Google Ads, given that Google remains the unchallenged leader in the search market. That volume offers certain advantages, especially when it comes to refining your audience targeting and reaching a niche audience.
If you’re a business that serves an extremely small customer segment, it’s possible that Bing doesn’t offer the scale you need to deliver the kind of value you’re looking for.
For most businesses, though, the size differences of each ad platform are a nominal concern. In fact, the smaller user base on Bing may actually offer some benefits to certain businesses.
The most notable differences between Bing’s audience and Google’s audience relate to age and income level: Bing’s users tend to skew older, with the typical user being more than 35 years old, and the most common age range landing between ages 55 and 64, according to search marketing research.
These individuals are more likely to be parents or even grandparents than the search users on Google, which can make the platform more attractive to businesses targeting these consumer groups.
In addition, the household income for the average Bing user tends to be higher than what Google offers: Nearly one-third of all Bing users have a household income above $100,000. And Bing desktop users spend about 35% more on online shopping than the average online search user.
However, Bing’s user base tends to be largely concentrated in the U.S. For brands targeting a global audience, Bing may be an effective tool to engage U.S. consumers, but it probably can’t help you spread your message to all corners of the globe.
The platform
In the past, Bing Ads had a reputation for offering only a limited selection of advertising tools, which limited the value of advertising through its search products. But the platform has greatly expanded its offerings in recent years, and Microsoft Advertising now offers a wide range of search ad tools that rival what Google is able to offer.
In addition to a wide range of targeting tools, Bing’s ad solution also features Microsoft Shopping Campaigns, which integrates with product listings managed through the Microsoft Merchant interface.
Businesses can also leverage the Microsoft Search Network, which delivers search-based advertisements to a number of syndicated web properties, including MSN and Yahoo. This is similar in design to what Google offers through its own search network.
More recently, Microsoft integrated artificial intelligence capabilities into its platform, making it possible to track audience behaviors and generate deep insights from the trends that emerge.
Again, this product is closely mirrored by Google Ads, which means that the only significant difference is the overall potential reach of any ad campaigns you create.
Although the size of the audience may have a small impact on the functionality or value of various platform features, the platforms themselves have much more in common with one another now than in years past.
How Can You Setup Bing Ads to Earn Money?
Because Microsoft is eager to increase search-generated revenue through Bing, the platform is relatively easy to use if you’re just getting started. It’s also similar to the process used to set up an account and start advertising through Google Ads.
Here’s the basic process, in five steps:
- Create a Microsoft Advertising account. Visit the main Microsoft Advertising page and create an account to gain access to the platform. If you’re doing this on behalf of a business, make sure to correctly enter all of that business’s information.
- Import Google Ads campaigns, if desired. If you’ve already created Google Ads campaigns that you want to import, you can do this as soon as your account is set up. A tip for the newcomer: Importing an ad can be a great way to test its effectiveness and compare your results to what you’ve gotten through Google.
- Conduct keyword research via Microsoft Advertising. The keyword research you’ve done through Google won’t carry over, so you’ll have to repeat this process to get accurate information about competitiveness and bid amounts.
- Set your ad spending budget. It’s best to wait until you’ve done your keyword research to set your ad budget. This allows you to adjust your budget based on your estimated spending and ROI.
- Create a campaign. If you’ve imported a Google Ads campaign, you can go ahead and launch it via Microsoft Advertising. Or you can create a new, custom campaign developed specifically for Bing.
After this initial startup process, you’ll want to monitor campaigns, analyze performance data, and make adjustments to your strategy to maximize your ROI through Bing. Look for instances where Bing’s performance seems to differ from that of Google, and note this in your paid search strategy to drive better results in the future.
Once you’ve maximized impression share on your most profitable keywords in Google Ads, the logical next step is to duplicate some of your top-performing campaigns to see if those keywords perform similarly on Bing.
Bing offers a distinct approach to search marketing that could improve the outlook of your paid search campaigns, increasing ROI and helping you improve your engagement with your target audience. Given its low initial cost and competitive targeting tools, it could be a worthy new wrinkle to add to your existing search marketing strategy.
Pros and Cons of Using Bing Ads?
With all the amazing features present in Bing ads, it is not all shiny. Here’s a brief breakdown of the pros and cons of using Bing instead of, or in addition to, Google’s search ad service.
Pros
- A lower cost per click, thanks to less competition: If you’re struggling to afford keywords that offer high value to your business, Bing might be a low-cost alternative to Google that can still deliver excellent results.
- User-friendly functionality: Bing makes it easy to manage your Search Partners, incorporate multiple images into a single ad, and consolidate ad groups into campaigns to more effectively manage those campaigns based on performance.
- Easy setup for Bing campaigns: Bing makes its platform just as easy to use as Google. And, if you already have a Google Ads account, you can import campaigns directly from Google, and then set custom budgets based on the costs within Microsoft Advertising.
- A larger character limit for ad titles: Bing allows up to 40 characters for a search ad title, compared to 25 for Google.
Cons
- Slower rollouts for new search advertising features: Although Bing’s offerings are similar to Google’s, Microsoft is often slower than its competitor when it comes to releasing new features and capabilities. This means you’ll often feel like you’re marketing ahead of the curve on Google, while waiting for Microsoft to catch up.
- Global reach limitations: As mentioned before, Bing isn’t widely used outside of the United States. This could create unpleasant constraints if you’re marketing to a global audience.
- A less diverse overall audience: Although Bing can be great for targeting affluent, older users, it may offer less value if you’re marketing to a younger audience or users with lower household incomes.
- Less robust tracking tools: Bing offers decent performance tracking tools, but it’s still behind the standard-bearer in Google. This can limit the insights you’re able to pull from your campaign performance metrics.
Ultimately, your marketing team will have to weigh these pros and cons to determine whether Bing advertising makes sense for your business.
How do you Make Money With Bing?
Apart from earning from Bing ads, there is another way you can get paid for using Bing. Bing is a web search engine that is owned and operated by Microsoft. Yes, Bing is kind of like Microsoft’s competitor to Google. But the two search engines are still actually quite different.
Bing Rewards launched in 2010 as a way to incentivize the use of the Bing search engine. Sure, it seems a bit like Bing is bribing people to use their search engine, but loyalty programs are pretty common in other industries.
With Bing Rewards, members earn credits for searching using Bing, checking out new features, and performing other tasks. As long as you’re signed in to your Bing Rewards account, you can earn credits while searching on any device.
The Bing Rewards program allows you to earn credits for searching on Bing, using new Bing features, or trying certain other Microsoft products and services.
Bing Rewards are tracked through a credit counter on your browser (Internet Explorer 7 or later, or the latest version of Firefox, Chrome or Safari), which appears in the top right corner of any Bing.com page you’re visiting.
Alternatively, you can download and install the Bing Bar, which has a Bing Rewards button and credit counter. Mobile users can also access Bing Rewards through their default mobile web browser.
Bing Rewards members can earn points for using Bing – consider it a frequent flyer program for searchers. It’s a tiered program, so more credits are available to upper level members.
Bing Rewards offers members different ways to accumulate credits. Using Bing for searches on your PC gives you 1 credit for every 2 searches, up to a maximum of 15 credits per day.
Other ways to earn:
- Invite friends to use Bing Rewards and earn 100 credits for each friend who reaches Silver status (for a maximum of 500 credits).
- Use Bing for mobile searches and earn 1 credit for every 2 searches, up to a maximum of 10 credits per day.
- Complete the tasks in your Bing Rewards dashboard. This is where Bing posts special offers that are typically worth 1 credit each, in exchange for completing a task. For example, as I’m writing this, Bing is offering 1 credit if you use the MSN Food & Drink App, and another if you explore Bing’s most popular features on a special web resource they created (see above).
Bing also offers special rewards incentives and limited-time promotions. When these are available, you’ll see the announcement on the Bing Blog.
Bing Rewards offers three different ways to redeem your credits: Shop, Donate or Win.
The filtering options for rewards are pretty much non-existent right now. You can choose Shop, Donate, or Win, but cannot filter by retailer, price or any other parameter. Currently, there are only 41 rewards listed in the Shop section, but if the program grows, filters would definitely be a necessary addition.
many of the Bing Rewards options offered are Microsoft products or those from their other brands, including Microsoft Store credits, discounts on Bing and Microsoft apparel, subscriptions to Microsoft OneDrive or premium Microsoft Outlook, Skype credit, or Xbox memberships and gift cards.
However, other Bing Rewards currently available in exchange for credits include:
- Points/miles for airline and hotel loyalty programs
- Prints and photobooks from Shutterfly
- Gift cards for Amazon, Applebee’s, Burger King, Domino’s Pizza, Groupon, IHOP, iTunes, Sephora, Starbucks and other businesses.
Each item available in the Bing Rewards Shop links to a product page with a description, image and price in points.
Alongside the price for Members and Silver users, you’ll see the amount of credits required for Gold users to redeem the reward.
Using the example above, at 525 credits, that $5 Burger King eGift will take you 950 searches to earn over 64 days (as you can only get 15 credits per day and less from mobile search). Is it worth it?
This is where the special offers come into play. If you’re only using Bing Search to earn rewards points, you’re probably not going to see much value in the program. But check in regularly to complete the daily deals and you’ll accumulate points a lot faster.
Of course, if you don’t want the rewards for yourself, Bing encourages members to donate their credits to a worthy cause.
How Much does Bing Advertising Cost?
The average cost per click on Bing across all industries is $1.54.
Bing’s average CPC is 33% lower than what we see on Google Ads. The few advertisers that are on Bing take advantage of a much less competitive ad auction, which helps keep CPCs low in most industries. Bing also still serves ads in the right-hand rail of the SERP, unlike Google, which gives it more room to show ads from advertisers with lower bids.
Even in expensive and typically highly competitive industries like Legal, advertisers still get a bargain on Bing with a low $1.42 CPC, despite the fact that keywords like “Lawyer” and “Attorney” find themselves as the most expensive keywords on Bing.
Interestingly, Bing’s traffic is oftentimes more expensive for retail advertisers than that on Google. Retail advertisers’ average cost per click is $1.24 on Bing but less than a dollar on Google. This may be in large part to Google continuing to expand its low-cost shopping ads at the expense of its traditional search ads.
Average Cost Per Click on Bing Ads
| Industry | Average CPC (USD) |
|---|---|
| Apparel & Accessories | $0.91 |
| Automotive | $2.52 |
| B2B Services | $1.16 |
| B2C Services | $1.78 |
| Careers & Employment | $0.75 |
| Consumer Electronics | $1.22 |
| Education | $2.79 |
| Finance & Insurance | $1.82 |
| Health & Wellness | $1.70 |
| Home & Garden | $1.01 |
| Home Improvement | $2.54 |
| Home Services | $1.50 |
| Legal Services | $1.42 |
| Real Estate | $2.88 |
| Restaurants & Food | $1.69 |
| Retail | $1.24 |
| Technology | $1.95 |
| Travel & Hospitality | $1.17 |
The average click through rate on Bing across all industries is 2.83%.
Bing’s average CTR is about 50% higher than what we see on Google Ads, and every industry had a higher average CTR than what we saw on Google. This may be in part since Bing’s expanded text ads boast a much higher CTR than those on AdWords.
Bing may be the best network for those offering Employment or Career services, boasting an impressive 3.53% average CTR. These advertisers have the worst average CTR on Facebook (0.47%).
Bing (and Microsoft’s recently acquired LinkedIn) may prove to be the ideal market for many B2B advertisers, boasting very high CTRs within that industry as well (3.01%). Other ads with strong CTRs on the Bing SERP are in the Finance & Insurance (3.51%), Apparel & Accessories (3.33%), and Retail (3.06%) verticals.
More personal industries like B2C Services and Real Estate yield more modest results from Bing, with CTRs averaging just above 2% (2.12% and 2.20%, respectively).
Average Click-Through Rate on Bing Ads
| Industry | Average CTR |
|---|---|
| Apparel & Accessories | 3.33% |
| Automotive | 2.34% |
| B2B Services | 3.01% |
| B2C Services | 2.12% |
| Careers & Employment | 3.53% |
| Consumer Electronics | 2.88% |
| Education | 2.37% |
| Finance & Insurance | 3.51% |
| Health & Wellness | 2.90% |
| Home & Garden | 2.70% |
| Home Improvement | 2.92% |
| Home Services | 2.55% |
| Legal Services | 2.84% |
| Real Estate | 2.20% |
| Restaurants & Food | 2.60% |
| Retail | 3.06% |
| Technology | 2.40% |
| Travel & Hospitality | 2.83% |
The average conversion rate on Bing across all industries is 2.94%.
Bing’s average CVR is slightly better than what we see on Google Ads, but that varies a lot from industry to industry. Bing’s audience is different than that of Google’s, and how people search on Bing is different as well. For example, whereas the majority of searches occurring on Google are mobile, Bing still attracts many more desktop searches.
These differences make Bing a big opportunity for many industries with longer sales cycles, such as Careers & Employment, Finance & Insurances, and Real Estate, all of which boast Bing’s highest average conversion rates (at 6.81%, 5.57%, and 5.13%, respectively).
Although Travel advertisers may notice a relatively low CVR on Bing (1.58%), they also may receive more clicks than other industries since Bing commands an impressive 41% of all travel paid clicks in the US. The extra volume of paid clicks helps to offset their relatively mediocre conversion rates.
Average Conversion Rate on Bing Ads
| Industry | Average Conversion Rate |
|---|---|
| Apparel & Accessories | 2.88% |
| Automotive | 1.62% |
| B2B Services | 2.64% |
| B2C Services | 4.80% |
| Careers & Employment | 6.81% |
| Consumer Electronics | 3.01% |
| Education | 3.55% |
| Finance & Insurance | 5.57% |
| Health & Wellness | 2.55% |
| Home & Garden | 2.54% |
| Home Improvement | 2.78% |
| Home Services | 3.36% |
| Legal Services | 3.58% |
| Real Estate | 5.13% |
| Restaurants & Food | 4.42% |
| Retail | 2.65% |
| Technology | 2.04% |
| Travel & Hospitality | 1.58% |
The average CPA on Bing across all industries is $41.44.
Bing’s average CPA is about 30% lower than what AdWords customers average. This is in large part due to Bing’s relatively cheap CPC. Whereas most advertisers enjoy cheaper conversions on Bing, most still get far more from Google.
Clients advertising popular home services see the greatest return on Bing, with an average CPA of $21.68. Bing’s audience is typically older, more educated, and more affluent than Google’s, which of course helps many high-value industries convert searchers on Bing.
However, Bing’s audience isn’t perfect for everyone. Bing’s older audience is oftentimes less tech-savvy, and advertisers in the Tech space often yield the higher CPAs on Bing Ads.
Average Cost Per Action on Bing Ads
| Industry | Average CPA (USD) |
|---|---|
| Apparel & Accessories | $25.16 |
| Automotive | $34.40 |
| B2B Services | $54.13 |
| B2C Services | $47.18 |
| Careers & Employment | $23.71 |
| Consumer Electronics | $39.85 |
| Education | $45.90 |
| Finance & Insurance | $37.30 |
| Health & Wellness | $42.47 |
| Home & Garden | $33.57 |
| Home Improvement | $84.85 |
| Home Services | $21.68 |
| Legal Services | $56.99 |
| Real Estate | $29.40 |
| Restaurants & Food | $26.14 |
| Retail | $30.25 |
| Technology | $102.94 |
| Travel & Hospitality | $73.15 |
Bing Ads often surprises many advertisers with very strong performance. Certainly, Bing doesn’t offer the same reach as Google and Facebook, but no ad platform is perfect. In fact, a complete marketing strategy should include multiple ad campaigns across different networks, since your prospective customers search for information on many different sites.
If you find yourself on the lower end of these numbers, that just means there’s plenty of room for improvement!
Is Bing ads Cheaper than AdWords?
In a recent study, one agency found that businesses (across industries) generally spend 20-35% of what they spend on Google Ads on Bing Ads. That means if your company created two identical campaigns on Google Ads and Bing Ads, your Bing Ads would likely cost 20-35% less than your Google Ads.
That doesn’t mean your ad campaigns will generate the same results.
While your company may spend less, you may also earn less — and vice versa. If unqualified leads click on your ads, for example, that doesn’t help your business reach its goals for acquiring a new client or generating a few more online sales.
You want to consider cost when debating between Google Ads vs. Bing Ads, but don’t make price the deciding factor. Look at the performance and return of your ad campaigns to find out which platform offers the best results.
How do I Optimize Bing ads?
Bing Ads has been changing substantially over the past few months, and it’s easy to miss out on features and updates.
Even though the Bing/Yahoo network brings in a lot less traffic than Google for most retailers, it’s nontheless a chunk of traffic you don’t want to lose.
And now as major browser Firefox makes their bold move and sets Yahoo as its new default search engine, it’s more important than ever that you are optimizing your pay per click ads on Bing.
If you haven’t had a chance to review some of the newest initiatives and updates from Bing, here’s a quick recap of five easy features that will help you make the most out of your Bing performance.
1) Use Bing Product Ads
Like Google Shopping, Bing Product Ads are a great way to beef up your Bing Ads account. You’ll need to create a catalog and upload a feed for Bing, and then you’ll be ready to create a campaign to show product ads.
Product ads can run alongside your normal text ad, giving you two opportunities to capture clicks. This will also help you to stand out among your competitors.
2) Monitor Competition With Auction Insights Reports
You now have easy access to this powerful competitive analysis tool from within the Bing Ads interface. Previously, it was only available with the Bing Ads Intelligence plugin for Microsoft Excel.
The Auction Insights Report gives you strategic data about which competitors are shown in the auction and how performance compares. Simply navigate to the Details dropdown and view these insights on your keywords.
Within this view, you’ll have access to metrics like impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate and top of page rate. This report is really useful to see how you’re stacking up against the competition specifically on the Yahoo Bing network.
3) Check Your Close Variant Matching
Back in September 2019, Bing announced that they’d be enabling close variant matching with modified broad match and exact match. This means that your keywords can match to similar variations, such as differences in abbreviations, singulars or plurals, and stemming.
A few weeks ago, this expanded to phrase match as well. This is enabled by default in your campaigns, but it’s a good idea to run reports and check the performance of your close variants.
We recently found a few cases where the “close variant” matching wasn’t so close and had begun branching out to much broader terms. If you see a lot of irrelevant search queries or wasted spend in your campaigns, you might want to consider disabling the close variant matching in Bing.
4) Utilize and Expand Negative Keyword Lists
Negative keyword lists are a great way to block underperforming queries or cut out wasted spend. It’s a great idea to create negative keyword lists for your account (such as anything that would be completely irrelevant, terms you don’t want to be shown for, past underperformers, etc). You can have up to 5,000 negative keywords per list, and you can create up to 20 lists per account.
The negative keywords can be found in the Shared Library in your account.
5) Take Advantage of Updates to Targeting
A few months ago, Bing made some changes that make it much easier to target your customers. You want to be showing relevant ads at the right place and the right time to make the most out of your potential investment.
A few of the relevant updates for targeting on Bing include:
- Ad scheduling in 15-minute increments
- Zip code targeting and exclusion
- Desktops and tablets combined into a single device targeting selection
These are just a few easy ways to make sure that you’re staying on top of your Bing Ads account and getting the best return on your investment.
Which Country Uses Bing the Most?
126 million unique US users performed 6 billion searches on the Bing network in March 2019, according to ComScore data. Today, Bing controls 36% of the US desktop search market.
That’s no typo. Almost half of the US runs a search powered by Bing every month. That’s not saying that everyone turns to Bing.com for every search—but many users are “bi-searchual” and use both Google and Bing-powered search engines to perform different tasks or use different search engines across their different devices. Still, 66 million Americans don’t use Google and rely on a Bing-powered search engine to search online.
What Percentage of Google ads are Clicked?
people do click on paid ads, it’s just a very small percentage. The current number out there today states that LESS THAN 10 PERCENT of people actually click on paid ads. That’s right, around 94% of all search traffic goes to organic results over paid ads. There are some very interesting reasons though that do show why people do and do not click on ads.
Reasons People DO Click On Paid
- They are over the age of 55
- Did not realize it was an ad
- The ad was well marketed
- The ad created interest
- Catchy titles (Clickbait!)
Reasons People DO NOT Click On Paid
- They are under the age of 35
- Worried their internet behavior will be tracked
- Lack of trust in online advertising in general
- Banner ads are not relevant to their search
- Worried about getting a virus
Which Country has Highest CPC Rate?
The nation with the highest CPCs (and the only country to have a higher CPC than the United States) is the United Arab Emirates, where CPCs average 8% more than they do within the US. A rich and diverse economy – which relies on industries such as finance and tourism, known for their high CPCs – likely helps to put the country at the top of the list.
Read Also: How Does Google Get Profit by Search Engine
Excluding the UAE and the US, the next ten most expensive countries (Austria, Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Chile, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, and Germany) all either share strong economic ties to the US, have surging economies, have very high English-speaking populations, or some combination of several of these.
Also, in all of these countries, Google acts nearly as a monopoly of search, with no significant competition from other search engines.
Final Words
Although most advertisers prefer Google ads to Bing ads, you can still make a lot of money on the Bing advertising network. If you work on your website or blog and attract a lot of visitors, you will find Bing ads to be very profitable.
