Bing has continually rolled out new features over the past few months in order to improve their service. They added enhanced change history graph, new extensions, and some great graphs to help analyze your account performance.
During the enhanced campaign transition, Bing added support to help accommodate the forced switch to enhanced campaigns. There were still enough difference that some of the data was lost in transition. This week Bing announced the next set of additional features when importing campaigns from Google AdWords.
Device Preferred Ads
Once device targeting was taken away at the campaign level in AdWords, advertisers needed to create new ads in their campaigns to target mobile devices. Since all users come in through the non-segmented campaigns, device preferred ads were needed to send different devices to an appropriate landing page for said device.
Bing now uses device preference as well, allowing advertisers who target mobile devices to easily import their current AdWords ad with device preferences intact.
Dynamic Url Parameters
In a similar vein, new parameters for destination url’s are now supported in Bing. These are almost exactly the same as AdWords. These parameters allow advertisers to establish conditions that dynamically change the destination url as needed.
Suppose you want to send to a mobile version of your page at the keyword level. Simply tag {ifnotmobile:www.website.com}{ifmobile:www.mob.website.com} to the end of the destination url. This tells the system to send the user to one page or another depending on the device.
Similarly is you are tracking revenue and returns at the keyword level all you need to do is add url.com?kwid{ifmobile:id1}{ifnotmobile:id2}. Just like the change to the urls, these parameters will tag the click with the appropriate device segmented ids for each keyword.
While building URLs with tracking codes is never anyone’s favorite task, the syntax is simple, clear, and an easy change to make. It also saves you the trouble of having to rework urls and structures after importing from AdWords.
Device Based Bids
Besides url changes, the new update also supports device based bid modifiers with a wide range of values form -100% to 300%. All other modifiers range from -90% to 900%. Additionally for those of us using multipliers for radius targets, that is available as well. This is a great addition for anyone targeting local areas, allowing you to bid up on users in those areas with high returns.
One thing that I love, and Google should add, is bid modifiers for tablets. Bing allows you to change the bid modifier on tablets rather than lumping desktops, laptops, and tablets together. I know some account managers have success on tablet but for most of my clients, tablet has been a bust and a continual pain point on ROAS and CPAs. Bing has come to the rescue and added the ability to target tablets as needed and even leave them out entirely.
Ad Extension Support
Ad extension support now allows extensions at the ad group level giving you additional fine-tuning to override your campaign extensions when needed. Ad extensions are always welcome and hopefully we will see more support for different types as time moves along.
New Bing Excel Add-in
Once you are already on Bing you have to manage your account. Bing is making management just a little easier with a new excel add in. It is currently moving into beta testing.
This add-in makes life easier by allowing you to directly import your account data directly into excel. This is great on its own since many advertisers use Excel to make the necessary edits to the account.
It gets better; once you are done, click a button and upload the changes back to your account. No more exporting data, opening it in excel, making changes, and uploading through the editor. The new add in puts it all into one step from download to upload. You never have to leave excel. Stay tuned in the future as more information is released on the add-in.
Closing
One of my favorite things about Bing is their continual support of advertiser’s choices. Not only have they made it easier to maintain consistency between AdWords and Bing, they continue to support device targeted campaigns.
Verticals and accounts unsurprisingly vary in performance over different devices. For those who enjoy enhanced campaigns and prefer the simpler structure, Bing has given the option to take advantage of those features. For those of us who have accounts that require a bit of extra tweaking when it comes to devices, Bing fully supports us in that decision as well. This attitude along with the commitment to offering new tools is very promising for the future of Bing Ads.
