Bing Ads: Advantages, disadvantages and hidden pitfalls

Microsoft Ads, or Bing, is an often unjustly neglected advertising system – at least in the Czech Republic, even though it has a 5 % market share among search engines there. While in Germany it’s 8 % and in the USA it is even 13 % (when combined with partner search engines such as Yahoo or DuckDuckGo). And even if we’re talking only about Czechia, a 5 % increase in volume is not bad at all, right?

Advantages

1. Easy to navigate 

Bing simply copied the entire Google Ads system (with minor exceptions). So those who are familiar with Google Ads will be perfectly fine with Bing right from the start.

2. Lower competition

Compared to Google Ads, there is much less competition – so you should be able to achieve a lower CPC along with a higher CTR.

3. Compatibility

Bing gets along well with Google Ads. Importing campaigns and Google Merchant Center can be done in  just a few clicks. However, this is where the challenges can appear. No worries though – we’ll cover them further on in this article.

4. Placement and targeting that Google Ads doesn’t have 

For example, you can create audiences based on LinkedIn data, i.e. targeting specific positions, industries or specific companies (this targeting is not yet available in the Czech Republic, but it works in Germany, for example). Very interesting is also the possibility of placing ads on Netflix (within Europe, so far available in DE, FR, UK and ES).

5. Better efficiency

Due to lower competition and bidding prices, you usually get additional revenue/​lead volume with a much higher ROI.

Disadvantages

The first two ones apply particularly to the Czech market: 

1. Lack of Czech system interface and support

In Bing, you cannot do without English or some other world language.

2. Cannot set currency in CZK

So even for campaigns targeted in the Czech Republic, you have to make payments in EUR/USD (or other available currencies).

3. More complex conversion settings 

In addition, there is no connection to Google Analytics, so you cannot import conversions from there. However, it looks like better times are ahead – Bing recently announced they are planning to add an option to import conversions directly from Google Ads.

4. Only one attribution model

As for conversions, the only available attribution model is Last click (at least for now)

What to watch out for?

• Don’t give the number of system conversions the same importance as conversions from Google Ads – always compare with  GA4 data as well. This is because in our experience, Bing over measures conversions compared to Google Ads. It also often takes credit for organic conversions.
• Don’t leave the bidding amount too loose. In general, the bidding amount should be lower than Google Ads (thanks  to less competition). However, Bing has proven to be quite “greedy” in the past – we have repeatedly seen that when we left the bidding limit high, the system started spending more and it increased the bid without any real reason. After reducing the bid, we then got essentially the same volume at a lower price. 
• Automatic strategies are not very reliable in our experience. Usually it is because of the lower volume of data. But even when we had plenty of data in our campaigns, the results were often a roller coaster. That’s why we use good old manual bidding in the vast majority of our campaigns.
• A broad match usually doesn’t work very well  – not even in combination with an automated strategy. It can often appear as complete nonsense. To give you an idea of what it looks like, here you can see the variance of search queries for a single keyword in broad match:

• Automatically included display network in search campaigns. For most search campaigns, the spend ratio in display network is at the bare minimum - so no big deal. However, there are rare cases where the display spend ratio is higher than the search spend ratio alone. The downside is that you can’t simply exclude the display network from search. 

A category of its own: Importing campaigns

In addition to the above, most of the pitfalls are hiding under the campaign import itself. As we said, importing campaigns is very simple and quick. However, the time you save thanks to that can eventually be spent correcting settings that got messed up during the import process. 

Here are the most crucial errors that can occur:

• If you import campaigns from Google Ads that use an automated strategy, and then change the strategy to manual CPC in Bing, you may set the average bid from the last 30 days, but in a foreign currency. This means that if the average bid for the campaigns was 10 CZK (approximately €0,40) , the bid will be set to €10. And that would not make anyone happy …
• Additionally, when switching from an automated strategy to a manual one, the bid can (and often does) get set at the keyword level. So then you find yourself lowering bids at the report level like crazy, wondering why the campaign is still spending so much and why it has such a high CPC. Our advice? Better check your keywords straight away to avoid this.
• Various random bids and bid adjustments that weren’t present in the original Google Ads campaigns may appear at the device, site, audience level or by extending to other campaign types such as Multimedia Ads. 

• We recommend Shopping/​PMAX campaigns to be created primarily manually. This is because when importing Google Merchant Center, in addition to the imported feed, the default catalog is set to have the United States as the location. When importing PLA/PMAX campaigns, the USA will automatically be set as the targeting location, which unfortunately cannot be changed anywhere (not even in the Editor). It’s something you might not notice right away – and spend the first week figuring out why the campaigns didn’t roll out, until you eventually contact support to discover this. 

That’s why we recommend creating these campaigns manually or taking this into account – you can duplicate the imported campaign with incorrect targeting in the Editor. Then, you can correct the targeting, delete the original campaign and publish it along with the new campaign. This way, everything should be just fine.

We’ll fine-tune Bing for you too!

Are you also interested in enriching your marketing mix with Microsoft Ads campaigns? If you want help or advice with setting up your Bing campaigns, don’t hesitate to contact us! We’ll find the best solution for you and make sure no errors come your way. 

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