PPC-Advice.com

You know, I didn’t know what to make of all the hype back at SES Chicago last year.  There were tons of people talking about how great Bing! had become, and how it would be so much better once they integrate Yahoo properties into Adcenter.  Being a seasoned veteran of the pay-per-click marketing game and having wasted many hours on trying to bleed the stone, I didn’t think twice about giving Microsoft another chance until recently.  Boy, was I wrong to wait!

When I started this blog back in 2007, the search landscape was pretty dull.  Google dominated, as it does today, and Yahoo and Microsoft MSN were competing for second place.  At the time, I was focusing my efforts on highly competitive campaigns in Google Adwords, the normal stuff: tweaking ad copy, setting up A/B split tests on landing pages, and driving up quality score.  When I tried the same successful campaigns and landing pages in Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, I was sorely disappointed with the results.

Back in the day, you couldn’t just port existing Adwords creative and landing pages to the other two engines because the traffic seemed so dissimilar at the time, that large-scale change was required in order to be successful.  That meant revisiting all prior knowledge of what worked and what didn’t and how each translated to a very different ad serving algorithm.  It just wasn’t worth the time to mess around with because of the low traffic numbers to both secondary engines.

That was then, this is now

Nearly three years later, Microsoft is making a name for itself in the search marketing field.  Yes, they’ve rebranded their search engine yet again, they have yet another four letter word domain, and they still have relatively low traffic numbers, however this time they have an ace up their sleeve.

With an impending switchover due hopefully sometime soon, Microsoft will start serving it’s search results on Yahoo.com.  All of a sudden, the two secondary engines will be a force to contend with.  Yeah, Google will always have their majority stake in the market, but with a unified advertising platform, marketers will no longer run into the problems of yesteryear.  What makes BingHoo so much better this go around?

• Bing’s search results are on par with Google:
  Some say this isn’t such a great thing because Microsoft hasn’t differentiated itself, but I respectfully disagree.  What Microsoft has done is made the system easier for users and marketers to compare, apples to apples.  In terms of volume, they’re still going to be behind, but the rest is eerily similar.
• Community support from agencies and in-house marketers:
  Some say having a bigger second-place competitor to Google will spur greater innovation, and I couldn’t agree more.  Just look at all the new additions to Google’s front page and search results.  Twitter integration, additional filtering options, fancier homepage, etc.  I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
• Conversions are easier, much easier:
  In a search marketing world so focused on success, Microsoft makes it damn easy.  I can’t explain exactly how or why, but they seemed to get ad serving correct this go around.  Also, using Adwords creative and winning landing pages from Google campaigns into Bing seems to work a lot better.

It might be too soon to tell, but the world might soon adopt a second opinion in Bing.  I know I have finally seen the light (and the ROI) from this once discarded advertising program.

Be Sociable, Share!

•