How to use Bing Ads to get cheap conversion.

My Bing Ads campaigns are actually converting better than the exact same Google CPC campaigns.  In fact, Bing conversions are double that of my Google Adwords campaigns.  

Sure, the number of impressions that Bing gets compared to Google is shameful to say the least,  but, Bing does merit some attention. For those of us hunting for long-tail wins, cash constrained startups that need to make every dollar count and businesses catering to a less tech-savvy market, Bing might be the icing on the cake!

Here is my experiment; I took my most successful Google CPC Campaign, duplicated it in Bing Ads (after modifying a few things on Bing to match targeting, budgets, negative keywords, etc that's on Google) and ran the campaigns simultaneously over a 2 week period. 

Here are the Google results:

61K Impressions, 1.9K Clicks, 3.13% CTR, 0.34 CPC, 3.8 Avg Pos.

Now compare these to the Bing results.

578 Impressions, 85 Clicks, 14.71% CTR, 0.08 CPC, 2.26 Avg Pos.

And for easy viewing, I tallied them up in a table:

Well, I can definitely assert that Bing is a dessert wasteland (at least for my region and industry) - impressions are immeasurable compared to Google's - in the same period of operation, Google generated 10,700% more impressions than Bing!  However, in that wasteland, the few wanderers that do come around tend to click through at a much better rate than their Google counter-parts.  As you can probably tell Bing has a better CTR by about 471%.  Now what about conversions?  Let's check out google Analytics for that information...

The green line is Bing and the orange is Google.  Clearly, Bing's conversion is twice as much as Google's.

Just in case you don't like the graph above.

Hands down, Bing's conversion rate is double that of Google's.  Meaning that it's also the cheapest.  A Bing conversion costs $0.43.  While a google conversion costs $3.00.  In this case, Google's cost of conversion is 697% more expensive.  

So how do we use this knowledge?  Well, if you are a boot-strapped startup, a business that caters to less technically apt users, or someone that wants to get into the dirty long-tail of search, I would say 100%, spend some time with Bing Ads!  It's takes a fraction of time to set up, your Google Ads are imported seamlessly (to an extent - read about importing CPA campaigns from Google) and you will pay significantly less for a click (at least for my industry/location it works)!  

It should also be stated that experimenting with Bing will give you different results than my own - this is highly due to geographical location and industry so you have to start experimenting.    

Lastly, and most importantly, Bing is a complementary service to your Google Ads -  Build your initial campaigns on Google Ads, get everything working, then spend about 10 minutes with Bing's importing tools and duplicate your successful Google ads onto Bing and see if they convert!

Give it a try!