2 Big Takeaways From Our Webinar with Bing

By Tinuiti Team

May 19 2014

Last Thursday, we introduced the brand new Bing Product Ads program to everyone on a joint webinar with Bing.

Our very own Director of Retail Search, Jeff Coleman, and Microsoft’s Lindsay LaFran (@lindslafranski) dropped their knowledge on Product Ads campaign setup and best practice strategy. The webinar already happened, but you can always sign up to grab the recording here.

A couple things were much clearer after the webinar, things that should better assist you in improving your campaign performance and overall understanding of the program.

1. Pay Attention to Mobile Traffic

Bing Product Ads is unique and actually better than Google Product Listing Ads in respect to what you can do to handle mobile traffic.

Jeff weighs in on Bing’s capability:

One cool feature about Bing Product Ads is that it lets you turn off desktop, mobile, or tablet traffic, which Google actually doesn’t allow. On Google you can only adjust mobile, but desktop and tablet traffic are always enabled

So, with Bing you could have a completely separate campaign just targeting mobile devices, just make sure to turn off desktop targeting in your mobile campaign and you’ll be able to set up a complete separate mobile campaign with different bids according to how that traffic converts for you.

So in theory, you could have a desktop, tablet, and a mobile campaign because Bing has given you the flexibility to turn off one, or both, or all. If you do segment out, say, smartphone traffic in one campaign, you’ll want to modify the campaign to have completely separate bids because you’re targeting different devices. So by setting up a new campaign and then just setting lower bids, you can down bid on mobile (mobile, tablet, or both).

2. The Time to Start Product Ads is Now

Lindsay-LaFran-Bing-Photo OK, so we were already hitting this message home before the webinar, but the reiteration is intentional and important. Bing Product Ads is an extremely similar program to Google’s Product Listing Ads when it first launched, just on a different search network.

This network is the Yahoo Bing Network, which Lindsay notes “has 510 million monthly retail searches and 65 million monthly searchers – again obviously important because if you use Bing Product Ads you’re going to be reaching this specific retail audience.”

A couple other important reasons to start testing Product Ads as a revenue driver:

You can easily create a campaign if you’re already on Google PLAs…for now: Retailers have until late August this year to transfer over their non-Shopping Campaigns PLA campaigns into Bing. This way, you can greatly expedite the process of structuring your campaign for Product Ads. You can, however, still transfer your Google feed over (even after August) as long as you make a couple changes: make sure you’re mapping over to Bing’s product categories & change your column for AdWords labels to bingAds_labels.
The Product Ad format is proven: We’ve seen Google’s PLA program see monumental success with the product display ad format on their SERP, and we should expect to see similar engagement and growth with Product Ads. A retail advertiser can actually have a text ad AND a product ad running simultaneously for a given query. Lindsay adds: I would say that it’s obviously an engaging ad format and I am sure as the months go on, we’ll probably be releasing more information and case studies about the specific numbers.
Q4’s coming up – Build your campaign performance history: Jeff puts this perfectly: If you go through the leg work to get your product started now, get your product active, and build out a program that works for you, two things are going to happen. First, you’re going to go through your learning curve and growing pains early so you don’t have to wait and figure everything out in Q4. Second, Bing is going to have half a year of historical performance to look back on. Every shopping engine needs to learn when and where to display your product. The longer you’re active, the more data they have on when customers are likely to click on your ads and the more likely you’ll be to show up for relevant searches.