This isn’t a rant about Bing. I don’t care about them either way.
Instead, this is a lesson about one of the most important principles in business: Leverage.
Let me explain …
According to the most recent data, Google has 86% of the UK search engine market. That means, for every 100 searches done in the UK, 86 are done on Google.
By comparison, Bing has just 10% of the search market. (Most of the remaining 4 are on Yahoo. Seriously. 1998 called, it wants its search engine back…)
This means, to have the same effect on your bottom line, time spent optimising Bing needs to have 8.6 times the impact of time spent improving your AdWords.
And, let me tell you – based on 11 years managing PPC accounts – you’ll never find anything that gives you 8.6 the return… even if you already have a highly optimised AdWords account.
So, given time is scarce, that time will always be better spent on AdWords, rather than Bing. For example…
(A) Writing and split-testing ads.
(B) Fixing/improving your keyword quality scores.
(C) Optimising your bids so your ads show in the most profitable positions.
(D) Split-testing your landing pages and conversion funnel.
(E) Making your offer more competitive – either by improving the offer itself, or by improving the way you present your USP.
(F) Improving the back end of your business – i.e what you do with your existing customers and prospects. And that includes…
(G) Adding additional products and services you can sell to your customers.
All of these things will give you a far higher return on your time than messing around with Bing Ads.
To learn more about these things, I suggest you download my free ebook, “How to dominate your market with search engine marketing.”
The book is slightly out of date. A few months after I finished it, Google moved the ads from the right hand side to the bottom of the page.
That changed the details, but not the principles or tactics. It’s still the most effective strategy for maximising your PPC profits.
Just click here to go do the download page. (No signup required.)
All the best,
Steve Gibson
P.S. There are two other downsides to using Bing Ads:
#1: Less traffic to optimise. Because Bing only gets a fraction of the traffic, it takes around 9 times longer to split-test your ads. (Or to optimise your bids.)
That means you’ll be wasting a lot of money running sub-optimal campaigns.
#2: A new learning curve. While most of Bing is the same as AdWords, but there are key differences. For example, quality score, and how they do keywords matching, to name just two things.
So, unless Bing can greatly increase its market share, it just isn’t worth the effort.
