Why Advertisers Should Pay Attention to Bing
While Google is uncontestably the most popular search engine, the Yahoo Bing Network has reached nearly 33% of the effective search market share, making it a significant advertising opportunity. In a 2014 analysis, nearly one in five retailers on both Google and Bing saw a greater click-through rate on Bing, revealing that there are some valuable differences in how Bing and Google conduct searches and sell advertisements.
Scaling a page such that 0 represents the top of the page and 10 the bottom, Shopping and Classifieds ads occupied an average position of 0.7 on Bing and 2.2 on Google. Being higher up on the page increases the likelihood that the advertisement will be noticed and clicked on. Although Google yields 138% more impressions than Bing, the average cost per click on Bing is 42% cheaper and advertisements have significantly less competition on Bing. It would be a good strategy, then, to take popular/expensive/competitive advertising keywords on Google and use Yahoo Bing instead.
The textbook speaks to the importance of making ads relevant to keywords, and Yahoo Bing has some advantages over Google to do this. Bing allows advertisers to schedule ads to accommodate different time zones, which is great for international audiences. Google requires setting the network, location, ad scheduling, language, and ad rotation at the beginning of the campaign and all ad groups must follow these. Bing allows advertisers to choose their targets: just Bing & Yahoo, just search partners, or both; advertisers may monitor which search partners are directing traffic to their website and exclude an individual partner. Google gives two choices: target Google or target Google and search partners. To target specific keyword searches, Bing lets users choose whether or not to allow close variants like plurals or misspellings of their targeted word, in lieu of an exact word or phrase match. Google uses close variants but does not give the choice of using exact matches instead. Both search engines use social media extensions, but Bing has integrated more relevant Twitter and Google uses Google+. Finally, Bing allows advertisers to control which gender and age demographics see their advertisements, an extremely effective marketing tool.
There are a few considerations that advertisers using Bing must take into account. Political affiliations and education affect search engine preferences on a macro-level, so advertisers will be more successful accommodating the demographic that uses Bing. Studies suggest that people living in the Great Plains and Rust Belt are more likely to use Bing than residents elsewhere. Google is also more advanced at detecting keywords in page content, whereas Bing looks for keywords in page titles, meta tag, and on the page; forcing users to enter in straightforward, specific keywords and, in turn, advertisers to target these keywords too.
References:
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/02/25/bings-ads-vs-google-adwords
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/should-you-optimize-for-yahoo-and-bing-ht