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Bing Ads Responds to Google Enhanced Campaigns

I was hoping that Bing Ads would finally come out and say something about Google’s new Enhanced Campaigns but wasn’t counting on it given how long they have waited. But Today Bing Ads finally did by responding to questions and speculation as well as what is at the core of Enhanced Campaigns in what I feel is a spectacular way.

What are the changes to Enhanced campaigns Bing called out?

Dare Obasanjo (Bing Ads Lead Program Manager) used some interesting images about the difference in device targeting pre and post Enhanced Campaigns.

Bing Enhanced Campaigns

Pre Enhanced Campaign Device Targeting

bing enhanced ads targeting

Then he proceeded to explain that this leaves you two options to really configure device targeting in Adwords.

  1. You can set an ad to “preferred” mobile. Which does not guarantee it will only serve on Mobile, but could also end up serving on Desktop and Tablets. And also does not guarantee that a desktop ad can’t serve on mobile ever.
  2. You can modify your bids on for mobile to be either higher or lower than your desktop bid at the campaign level. You can no longer bid separately for tablets and this bid adjustment is for the whole campaign not by ad groups or keywords.

Why Would Advertisers Worry About These Changes?

Dare (such an appropriate name for the writer of the Bing Ads response), went on to say the first reason this is worrisome is because of the inherent difference between devices. Tablets and Desktops perform differently. Now that Google names them equal you can’t control and maximize profits or minimize losses between these two device types anymore.

Second, he points out that you can’t have mobile only Campaigns anymore. This is a huge issue whether Google believes it is or not. I know of some advertisers that almost exclusively ran on mobile spending $100k plus a month because they were focused on calls in specific metro areas. This could potentially wipe out the profitability of their mobile campaigns. Bing Ads did say people are trying to figure out work arounds to this but they are timely and not intuitive.

Enhanced Campaigns has definitely brought up the need for Responsive Web Design. But as Bing Ads mentioned most companies are not using it currently. This means Google is essentially forcing companies to completely redesign their website when they may not have to at this point. I know plenty of Fortune 500 companies who just spent a year plus designing mobile versions of their sites a year ago. They are beautiful and work well, should they really have to redesign their whole site, including their desktop version to work correctly on mobile. If the big companies could have problems with this, how much of a challenge do your think this could pose for the mom and pop stores it says Enhanced Campaigns will help, because of simplifying things for them?

What is Bing Ads Going to do About Enhanced Campaigns?

First of all as Bing Ads said just earlier today, advertisers deserve control! Bing Ads came right out :

We are committed in giving advertisers the tools to control their spending, target the most relevant audience, and ensure they can get the best return on investment. Thus, we do not believe bundling together mobile, desktop and tablet advertising in an opaque manner is in the best interest of our customer base or the industry at large. The Bing Ads team wants to ensure you, our customers, have maximum transparency.

I don’t know about you but that is one of the biggest draws to PPC and why it has consistently been one of the better performing marketing channels for clients. They have control and much more transparency to leverage and make decisions than almost any other advertising medium. It is why at Get Found First we decided to just focus on PPC Management, we are a little OCD. We like Control & Transparency, and the opportunity it gives us to provide the best ROI and constantly work to improve profits for our clients.

WILL I STILL BE ABLE TO IMPORT CAMPAIGNS FROM GOOGLE ADWORDS INTO BING?

The short answer is yes! This was a question I posed in a blog post earlier this year on how Enhanced Campaigns might affect Bing Ads. Bing believes in advertiser portability of data and will be working to “ensure advertisers can continue to seamlessly transition between both products.” This won’t be happening until maybe August or so of this year, but will be happening. So if you have well built out Google Campaigns you may want to import them to Bing Ads before you transition to Enhanced Campaigns. Otherwise your next opportunity will be later this summer or beginning of fall, and then you will be transferring enhanced campaigns.

SOME GOOD THINGS ARE COMING TO BING BECAUSE OF ENHANCED CAMPAIGNS

Here are just a couple of the good things coming to Bing Ads because of Enhanced Campaigns:

  • Importing “mobile preferred ads” will mark them for use on mobile on the Yahoo! | Bing network, and only mobile. So no mobile ads on desktops.
  • They will be augmenting (not enhancing) their existing incremental bid functionality to support negative percentages as well.
  • Incremental Bids will also be able to support device and location radius targeting.

I for one am glad something good is coming from Enhanced Campaigns besides increased CPCs for Google. Bing Ads is improving some of it’s functionality and even more important it is maintaining that separate not equal is good for the advertiser and the consumer. What’s your take on this? Are you relieved by Bing Ads’s decision or were you hoping they would follow in Google’s shoes?

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Bryant Garvin PPC Dictator & Chief Consultant at Bryant Garvin Consulting

Bryant Garvin has been involved with marketing for over 10 years known by many of his peers as the PPC ...

Bing Ads Responds to Google Enhanced Campaigns

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