Some advertisers mistakenly believe that PPC begins and ends with Google AdWords. There’s no disputing that AdWords is the largest paid search platform, but overlooking Bing Ads is a mistake far too many advertisers make! Bing Ads is cheaper than AdWords, and many high-commercial intent search terms that would be completely unattainable in AdWords are within reach on the Yahoo Bing search network.
Whether you advertise on both Bing and AdWords, or you're just considering testing out the Bing PPC waters, there’s never been a greater need for reliable data to help you make solid business decisions. With this in mind, we’re proud to announce our latest free tool to help you win at PPC, the Bing Ads Performance Grader.
Invaluable Insight into Your Bing Advertising Account
WordStream’s Bing Ads Performance Grader allows you to quickly and easily diagnose the strength of your Bing Ads account. Similar to our award-winning AdWords Performance Grader Plus, the Bing Ads Performance Grader evaluates the strength of your Bing Ads account across several crucial metrics, including:
- Click-through rate
- Landing page optimization
- Negative keywords
- Text ad optimization
- Wasted spend
Once the Bing Ads Performance Grader has finished evaluating your Bing advertising account, you’ll receive an easy-to-read report card via email, providing you with invaluable insight into which areas of your account are doing well, and helping you identify areas where improvements can be made.
Opportunities are Ripe for the Taking on Bing Ads
One of the biggest misconceptions about Bing Ads is the potential reach of the Microsoft partner network. For savvy advertisers, Bing Ads represents an enormous potential market, particularly for businesses operating in certain verticals.
For example, according to John Gagnon, Bing Ads Evangelist at Microsoft:
- Bing represents 29% of the U.S. search market
- Between 70-80% of searches for terms within the travel and telecom verticals are not using Google
- 50% of searches for retail-related keywords – approximately 31 million monthly searches – occur on Bing, not Google
Bing Ads represents a major opportunity for advertisers who are equipped with the data they need to capitalize on the potential of the Microsoft partner network, and WordStream’s Bing Ads Performance Grader can provide you with this information completely free.
How to Evaluate Your Bing Ads PPC Account with WordStream
Assessing the strength of your Bing PPC account with the free Bing Ads Performance Grader is super easy:
- First, tell us a little about your company. We ask for this so that we can provide you with relevant benchmark data about how your Bing Ads account stacks up against the competition in your industry.
- Next, securely log into your Bing Ads account – you only need to do this once, and the connection is handled entirely through OAuth, so your data is completely safe.
- Finally, tell us which email address you want your report to be sent to, and we’ll send you a ton of actionable data about the metrics in your account that are doing well, and areas in which immediate improvements can be made.
How to Read Your Bing Ads Performance Grader Report
Your Bing Ads Performance Grader report is broken into several sections, each of which corresponds to a different metric of your account. This allows you to see, in detail, how things are going in your Bing Ads account.
The first section shows you your overall score, which is graded as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the stronger your account is. You’ll also be able to see, at a glance, some statistics relating to your account, such as how many active campaigns you’re running, how many clicks your account has registered during the past 90 days, and your average monthly spend.
Each of the other sections in the report correspond to your account’s performance in that specific area.
Your data is displayed in green, either in a bar chart or plot graph, whereas WordStream’s recommended performance is displayed in yellow. In the example below, you can see the wasted spend of the account in green, compared to the WordStream Recommendation in yellow. You’ll also notice that we provide you with a percentage grade for each individual account metric, too.
The notable exception to this format is in the “PPC Best Practices” section of the report. This metric evaluates how closely your account follows established PPC best practices, and uses pass/fail logic to provide you with an at-a-glance rundown of which areas you need to focus on.
In the example below, you can see that this account needs to customize settings for network targeting and ensure that multiple text ads are running.
The Bing Ads Performance Grader doesn’t just show you areas of your account that could be doing better. We want you to succeed with Bing Ads, so we also provide you with actionable suggestions on what to do differently so you can gain a valuable edge over your competition and grow your business.
We’re extraordinarily proud of the Bing Ads Performance Grader, and we’re confident that it will help your business grow your business with Bing Ads.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Bing Grader, so please try it today, and if you have questions or feedback, be sure to share them in the comments!
About the Author
Mara is a Product Manager at WordStream and the lead product manager on the Bing Ads Performance Grader. She works with customers, our customer-facing teams and our engineering team to create features and products that help our customers grow their business through paid search. While not at work you can find her teaching her dog new tricks or outside running, biking or skiing.
