25 Fast Facts About Bing Ads

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In honor of this week’s change in branding from adCenter to Bing Ads, and as a counterpart to 25 Fast Facts About Google AdWords, here are 25 facts and figures about Bing Ads, Microsoft’s PPC advertising platform:

1. With a single Bing ad buy, you can reach 162 million unique searchers using Microsoft and Yahoo sites (including Yahoo Search, Bing, and partners), which account for 30% of total search engine share and over 6 billion searches a month. (comScore Core Search, January 2012)
2. From June 2011 to June 2012, Bing stole 5% of Google’s search share. (Experian Hitwise)
3. Bids on Bing tend to be lower, and the competition for keywords is lower. (Hubspot)
4. Local, travel, shopping and health related searches account for 30-40% of total search queries. Sessions in these four areas on Bing are often longer and more complex, so Bing might be worth exploring if you run a business in one of these verticals. (Microsoft)
5. Searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo sites are likely to spend 21.5% more than the average web searcher, and 0.76% more than Google searchers in the U.S. (comScore Core Search, August 2011)
6. In July 2012, Bing reported a 12% increase in advertising revenue. (Search Engine Land)
7. Worldwide, paid search click-through rates on Google and Bing have been neck in neck. Average worldwide CTR on Bing in Q1 of 2011 was 2.5%, compared to Google’s 2.9%. However, in 2010, Bing’s average CTR was higher than Google’s, at 2.8% to Google’s 2.5%. (eMarketer)
8. Bing and Yahoo ads allow you to use 40 characters in your title. By contrast Google ad titles have a character limit of 25. (Hubspot)
9. Bing shows more ads at the top of the page (above the organic results) than Google for most searches. That means advertisers have a greater chance of winning one of those coveted top spots. (WordStream)
10. Bing offers better support for small advertisers than Google. You have to spend more than $500,000 a year on AdWords to earn a dedicated account rep. You only have to spend $500 a month to talk to a Bing rep for free through the Quick Launch program. (Entrepreneur)
11. Knowing your search engine demographics can help you better achieve better targeting in your search campaigns. Bing users are 58% female. Google’s user base, by contrast, is only 45% female. (Slingshot SEO)
12. adCenter used to allow advertisers to target ads by age and gender, but Microsoft quietly removed this feature in July 2012, claiming the information was often inaccurate. (SEO Roundtable)
13. You can import your AdWords campaigns directly into your Bing Ads (adCenter) account.  (Search Engine Watch)
14. Microsoft’s free Ad Intelligence keyword tool is an Excel plug-in that you can use to post new keywords directly to your Bing account. (Search Engine Watch)
15. Bing offers IP Exclusions, which allow you to block your ads from showing on specific IP addresses or ranges. (Bing Ads Support)
16. Bing’s quality score reporting is more comprehensive and transparent than Google’s. You can even create a historic quality score report that allows you to identify specific dates that changes took place. (PPC  Hero)
17. In Google, you can use Google only or Google and search partners. Bing Ads, on the other hand, allows you to target search partners only. (PPC  Hero)
18. Bing also offers a Negative Keywords Conflict Report, so you can find out if any of your negatives conflict with keywords you’re bidding on (one of those cases where your best intentions could hurt your results). (Bing Ads Support)
19. Half of clicks for the most popular car sale related keywords come from ads in position 1. CTR is highest in position 1, but costs per click are actually the lowest. (Bing Ads internal data, July 2012)
20. An analysis of travel keywords of Bing Ads advertisers showed that long-tail keywords performed best. The highest click-through rates (CTR) are consistently found on keyword terms with four or more words, often including a destination and an offer such as “Hawaii all inclusive vacation packages.” On average, 4-word keyword phrases had a CTR of 5.83% compared to 1.71% on one-word terms and 1.95% on 2-word terms. (Bing Ads internal data)
21. One advertiser found that his bounce rate for Bing-generated traffic is 8% lower than the site’s overall bounce rate. (Microsoft Research Library)
22. While AdWords usually wins in the B2C world, B2B campaigns can often drive more traffic and achieve higher ROI in Bing versus Google. (As always, your mileage may vary.) (Search Engine Watch)
23. By leveraging the “Rich Ad” format in Yahoo (similar to AdWords ad extensions) on exact match keywords, advertisers average a 30-35% CTR and a 40-50% higher CTR when compared to a standard text ad. (Internal Yahoo and Microsoft Data)
24. Bing offers “Share of Voice” metrics that show you not only your impression share but where you’re losing share of voice, including impression share lost to budget, lost to rank, lost to bid, lost to landing page relevance and lost to keyword relevance. (Search Engine Land)
25. Bing recently increased its website exclusion limits from 500 to 2000, enabling better targeting and quality control. (Bing Ads Blog)

This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.