The Bing Ads Campaign Planner has been available since 2014. The tool was created to help advertisers understand competition levels and industry benchmarks. Admittedly, I have just recently started using the Campaign Planner and found that the insights provided are especially helpful when creating a strategy for segmentation of campaigns and ad groups. In this post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the Campaign Planner and my favorite ways to implement changes in account structure based on metrics provided in the tool.
Getting Started
To access the Bing Ads Campaign Planner, navigate to the Tools section as shown below.
Once you navigate to the Campaign Planner, you’ll see the alert below. The tool will be moving to the new Bing Keyword Planner sometime soon. Depending on when you are reading this post, Campaign Planner may have already been moved.
The Campaign Planner allows advertisers to save various verticals as favorites. Below, you can see all of the verticals included. You can either use the drop down to see sub-verticals and products or use the keyword search function to get more specific information. In this example, I will go through the Campaign Planner for Self-Publishing.
Unfortunately, not all verticals are covered in the Campaign Planner. Try the keyword search option if you can’t find your business’s vertical in the drop down.
Keyword search:
Product selection:
Campaign Planner Takeaways
Geotargeting Segmentation
The default information in the Campaign Planner is set for the US Market. To get estimates for locations in Australia or Canada, navigate to the top of the Campaign Planner and select from the dropdown.
Use the search volume by location section to determine if location-specific campaigns are needed. In the above example, search volume is estimated to be at 52.6% in New South Wales and 30.9% in Queensland. In this scenario, I would plan to break out campaigns as shown below.
- Self-Publishing Companies_Search_New South Wales
- Self-Publishing Companies_Search_Queensland
- Self-Publishing Companies_Search_Other AU
Device Segmentation
Sometimes it’s difficult to decide if you should split out campaigns by device. For Self-Publishing, Bing estimates 13.8% of volume is on Smartphones while 80% is on Desktop and 6.2% is on Tablets.
You can also navigate to “Performance by device” to see the below metrics:
- Search volume %
- Impression %
- Click %
- CTR Comparison
- CPC Comparison
Based on this information, I would not segment campaigns by device. I would, however, be sure to closely monitor smartphone and tablet performance to see if bid modifiers were needed.
Competitor Targeting
To get an idea of who your top competitors will be before launching a campaign, use the competition section in the Campaign Planner. Below are the competitors listed in the US market for self-publishing.
Be careful before targeting the competitors in these lists. Bing uses domains that are top competitors for the vertical and related keywords. In the below list, lulus.com (a women’s clothing retailer) and shop.lululemon.com (popular athletic apparel retailer) are listed as self-publishing competitors. These non-self-publishing domains are included because their branded keywords compete with the publishing site lulu.com.
Targeting the other company and domain names in this list with a competitor campaign would be a worthwhile test. The coverage and average position metrics to gain insight to where competitors are showing in the search engine results page.
I also like to use competitor data before creating ad copy. For example, say I am creating a general non-branded self-publishing campaign. Using this competitor information, I can see that 48hrbooks.com and authorhouse.com are maintaining strong average positions above 3. Before writing ad copy, I should search their branded terms or general publishing queries in Bing to make sure my ad copy stands out among the competition.
Final Thoughts
Keep in mind that the Bing Campaign Planner is not only helpful when launching new accounts or campaigns. Use the above insights to identify areas in your accounts that should be restructured or optimized to reduce inefficient spend and/or expand your reach. To learn more about the Bing Campaign Planner, visit the Bing ads blog.
