Today, Bing announced that their long awaited Bing Product Ads (BPA) program is live and available for all retail advertisers.
The news is no doubt significant to retailers and retail advertisers, considering the amount of success that Google PLAs experienced when Product Search switched to the paid model. The program will be a feed-based, CPC model and campaign setup is designed to be seamless if you’re already managing a Product Listing Ads campaign. In fact, you can transfer over your campaign from PLAs for easier BPA setup.
Generally speaking, the Yahoo/Bing network receives about a third of all search queries online, so the new BPA program gives retailers the opportunity to run targeted product ads to this significant chunk of the consumer search market. A couple statistics about the network from Bing itself:
- 510 Million Total Retail searches per month
- 65 Million Total Retail searchers
- 31 Million Retail searchers not reached on Google
- 117M Retail paid clicks
- 22% of all Retail paid clicks
Bing Product Ads is a response to Google’s widely successful PLA program. The big picture question is, will it deliver similar performance for retailers?