If you’re a business with ecommerce capabilities and you’re not on Google Shopping, Bing Product Ads, and other Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s)
then “Houston we have a problem.” For many of our clients Product Ads, Shopping, and CSE’s make up the more than half of their overall revenue. While Google Shopping tends to be the “mack daddy” of them all, Bing Product Ads made enough of an impact this year for our clients that they deserve mentioning.
Bing Product Ads was officially released to all U.S. advertisers, after months of a closed Beta, in summer of 2014. As an agency, we definitely found a few hiccups with the platform, but found its worth during the holiday season. While Google and Bing run on a different scale as far as reach, Bing has shown us amazing on site metrics when it comes to regular search ads. These great metrics held true for Bing Product Ads too.
During the holiday season we ran a Bing Product Ads campaign for client who sold safety boots. In December alone they spent $211.13 on Bing Product Ad campaigns and received $2,206.38 worth of revenue. In Google they spent $1,642.68 and received $5,633.29 in revenue. While the difference in revenue is a lot, Bing made over 10x their ad spend and Google made less than 4x.
Another client ran both Google Shopping and Bing Product Ads during the holiday season. Bing’s on site metrics align well with Google’s and in some cases performed better.
While Bing Product Ads is not as robust as Google Shopping (yet), it still brings a pretty fierce competition. Marketing and advertising is an industry where testing is crucial as trends are always changing. Studies show that more and more people are searching on Bing and Bing has a large Business focused audience. Also Firefox has made Bing – Yahoo their default search browser. Yahoo is part of Bing’s search network. In conclusion if you haven’t tested your products on Bing Shopping, we highly recommend you do.
