Bing is at it again, and right in time for holidays! Product Ads were a big hit in attracting shoppers on the Yahoo Bing Network last year because of their rich, engaging format. This year we’ve launched Bing Shopping Campaigns to help advertisers capture our shopping audience with enhanced control, insight and efficiency, and with consistent management across advertising platforms.
The new Bing Shopping Campaigns feature greater control, better insight and more efficiency when managing your Product Ads.
New Bing Shopping Highlights
More control
Target your products with a high degree of granularity in your feed to get more control over what products you’re showing and your bidding strategy. Also, prioritize multiple campaigns that advertise the same product.
Deep insight
View performance data right down to the Item ID level with enhanced reporting. Plus, use benchmark reporting to see how your products are performing in the marketplace compared to competitors advertising the same products.
Easy management
Get a quick, intuitive way to view all your approved products. See your inventory by attributes like brand or product type, select inventory you want to promote or exclude and set appropriate bids.
Improved efficiency
If you’re already running Google Shopping Campaigns, import them directly into your Bing Ads account. Once set up, Bing Shopping Campaigns are easy to manage and maintain because the structure and capabilities are consistent across platforms.
For more benefits to switching to Bing Shopping Campaigns now, visit Bing's Shopping Campaigns vs Product Ads campaigns page.
Getting Started
It's easy, but make sure to update your feed first!
For Product Ads AND Bing Shopping Campaigns, field names in the Bing Merchant Center Feed File are being updated. You’ll no longer be able to use the same columns as before, so make sure to get the full list of supported field names and see how the feed file is organized here.
Note: You can also use your Google feed if you prefer. Please see the list of supported fields.
We’ve made it very easy to get started by giving you the option to import your Google Shopping Campaigns or create a new Bing Shopping Campaign within the Bing Ads UI. For detailed instructions, learn more on the Bing Shopping Campaigns page.
Optimizing Bing Shopping Campaigns
Budgeting
Set your shopping campaign budget in context of the budget for campaigns containing similar keywords to products in that group. Some advertisers have also found that allocating 30% of their total budget to shopping campaigns is a good starting point.
Bidding
Don’t underbid or leave low performing ads: Until you establish click history, set your initial bids to an amount that is equal to or greater than your current bids for keywords that most closely correspond to that product or group of products. Once you start seeing data, don’t ignore low performing ads, review them and ensure that low bids aren’t limiting your ad’s exposure.
Optimizing
Use campaign priority: Setting a particular campaign's campaign priority will allow you to be more nimble in your bidding strategy and more flexible in the products you decide to give precedence.
Monitor the difference in performance between in your text ads campaigns and Bing Shopping Campaigns over time: Use the new reports available for Bing Shopping Campaigns within the Dimensions tab to inform bids, product groups and budgets to achieve your business goals. Additionally, use the share of voice report and the search term report determine where there is more opportunity.
Use customized destination URLs to track Product Target performance: Similar to using specific destination URLs for specific keywords, you can also set specific destination URLs for specific product groups.
Test, test, test
We hope this information has been useful and that you’ll start testing out Bing Shopping Campaigns today! Connect with us via Bing's blog, Facebook and Twitter.
Brittney Thomas is a Retail Lead with Bing Ads where she evaluates performance within the Retail Industry to identify development opportunities and acts as a chief customer advocate within Microsoft.
