What’s New on Bing Ads?

Because Bing’s percent of total purchases, reservations, etc. varies from advertiser to advertiser, as does, quite frankly, the value and importance of advertising on Bing.

During an agency-wide touch-base with PMG’s Bing reps in March, we learned about several recent and upcoming enhancements that may provide more opportunities for advertisers to improve performance on Bing and/or make managing the platform easier. Below is a recap of what we learned:

In the U.S., sidebar text ads ceased on March 26. They will continue to serve in other countries for now but may eventually sunset across the board.

Tests conducted by Bing showed positive results after sidebar text ads were removed:

You may be wondering, “What about other non-mainline ads?” Product ads will continue to serve on the sidebar, and bottom of page (BOP) ads will increase from three to four. And with that will come the removal of duplicate ads at the top and bottom of the SERP.

It’s important to note that these changes apply to the Bing SERP exclusively, not syndication partners such as AOL and Yahoo.

These pay-per-click units show beneath the text of ads in position 1. They may not show every time an ad is served in the top position, but as many as 20 can be applied to any given account, campaign or ad group.

According to Bing, these extensions provide users with “exactly what they’re looking for when they’re looking for it… [helping] increase clicks and drive potential customers straight to converting experiences.”

Similar to AdWords promotion extensions’ promo requirement designations, Bing price extensions allow for price qualifiers. Dissimilarly, price extensions do not allow for an occasion tag (i.e. Cyber Monday) but do offer a 25-character header and a 25-character description (compared to AdWords’ 20-character item description only).

You may (read: probably) have transferred campaigns built in AdWords to Bing using the import feature. There is now an option to choose which items to add, update or delete.

Bing recommends checking negative keywords after transfer, as the platform does not support broad match negatives.

This clickable icon identifies high-quality advertisers. Eligibility is based on third-party fueled merchant rating scores, although high scores do not guarantee eligibility.

These are automatically applied based on detections from within an advertiser’s product feed.

These are based on reviews from an advertiser’s site and third-party sources.

Now for some non-advertising related updates:

Using the platform’s cropping tool, users can now identify a product within an image and shop other similar products instantly.

The new feature “leverages computer vision and object recognition… to detect and highlight different products within images.” To dive into the specifics, a magnifying glass icon located in the top right corner of an image allows users to select the product for which they want to see results.

On the knowledge front (as opposed to the shopping front), another new feature applies similar technology to inform users about landmarks within image searches, and – get this – even landmarks within images they upload. Once Bing identifies said landmark, it will then “share interesting information… such as the origins and other relevant trivia. For instance, why it was created and even what kind of stone it was made from.”

First launched in December 2017 and powered by AI, intelligent answers help tackle questions/queries with multiple possible answers/responses.

According to a December blog post,

Pretty cool, huh? To take things one step further, a March blog post announced the addition of hover-over definitions for uncommon words.

To help users sift through what can seem like an abyss of search results,

Like I said, not everyone thinks of or treats Bing in the same way. But will that start to change? We’ll see… As we like to say around the office, “Bing it on!”