Kyrill Krystallis, of Inside Insight, on the topic of testing Bing PPC Ads in June - July 2021...
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Bings Ads PPC in 2021 - Thoughts & Results
What is up guys,
So, after testing Pinterest Ads on my "little" Shopify Ebook Store...
(Article on this test can be found here 👈)
I decided to give good old Bing ads a test...
Now, I know that Microsoft Edge (what used to be known as Internet Explorer) comes pre-installed on all Windows PCs.
And unless it is immediately replaced as a default browser by Chrome or Mozilla, it remains as a default browser app with it's default search engine being Bing.
As a matter of fact, apart from being forced to use Bing, many people actually enjoy using the search engine...
To be exact, as many as 120 Million people in the US alone enjoy using Bing.
More info on Bing and it's demographic...
As per Wordstream's article on "Who uses Bing, anyways?", there can be up to 6 billion searches on Bing's network alone, monthly.
Bing's users also tend to fall under the demographical umbrella of those older, with children, and with higher household incomes...
And if you consider Bing's PPC competition as opposed to Google Ads, it makes perfect sense for Bing to have a noticeable lower CPC, as bid competition should logically be lower.
Which is exactly why I decided to pair my recipe E-book with Bing's PPC Ads...
Setting up a Bing PPC Advertising account was super easy.
All you have to do is provide some details about yourself, your company, your payment details, and you're good to go...
Building a Shopify store to host your offer is a different story though.
For my Shopify store, I used the famous Debutify 3.3 theme.
Not only is it well-styled and easy to manipulate as a theme, it's also free and can be easily worked with without having to upgrade to Premium.
For my test product, I decided to go ahead with a Recipe E-book.
Not the "most desired" product to test out, but I based my decision on the fact that it's digital, easy to create, easy to deliver and has no physical shipping involved.
(For future re-testing, I will most likely test a digital course instead. Ideally centred around cooking & recipes...)
Keyword Researching & Launching my PPC Bing Ads...
My keyword research was a simple as 1-2-3...
After spending 20 minutes on the phone getting advise from an ex-colleague on how to replicate Google PPC's keyword bidding strategies directly on Bing's PPC platform, I decided that I would bet my ads on several low-cost related phrase match keywords.
Bing Ad's in-built keyword research tool is pretty straight-forward and highly alike to that of Google's Keyword Planner with indications towards monthly volume, suggested bids & level of competition ranked as low, medium & high.
An image of some of the keywords I placed my bid on can be found here:
(REMINDER: The product was a recipe e-book...)
My PPC Bing Ads Bidding Strategy...
For bidding, I used the strategy of Enhanced CPC which as far as I understood is highly alike to manual CPC but with an additional 5-10% margin on your bids to increase the chance of congruence between the advertiser's bid and the cost of a click.
My actual Bing Ad:
Structuring your Bing Ad is highly alike to structuring any Google Search Ad. It generally consists of a headline, description and extension.
I kept my headlines simple and straight to the point, and for descriptions I simply repurposed some of the text contained in the product's landing page.
An example of my Bing PPC ads can be seen below:
My PPC Bing Ads Results...
Now as per results:
General CPCs varied, with clicks coming in from the US, Australia, UK & Ireland at $0.65 to $0.80 depending on the keyword itself.
My ad quality score in all cases surpassed 9. Bing's PPC system rates all ads from a scale of 1-10. The higher an advertisers quality score the less they need to pay for their clicks.
Our ads generated zero sales but I am certain that that is not a result of the landing page, nor the ad but instead, the targeting.
I'd placed ads on keywords related to summer recipes;
People generally search for those keywords when they want a quick 10-15 minute single recipe (of which there's an abundance of online) as opposed to an entire e-book priced at 9.99 euros with f&5k knows what inside...
In further tests, I'd start bidding on actual terms like "recipe book" or "recipe ebook" which should be more relevant to the offer and the "clicker's" needs.
All in all, the general results coming from my micro-experiment were pretty positive in both aspects of further understanding Bing Ads & Shopify.
Future Bing Ads PPC Tests:
In the future, I plan to test more Bing Ads across B2B related terms for both Inside Insight's agency and Exit Deals' listing platform.
Will post further updates on the blog.
Catch you guys & gals later.
Kyrill Krystallis
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