As part of this month’s PPC Hero series, we’re diving in to the little known, oft-neglected, and unknown reports that you can use to turbocharge your PPC performance. I don’t know about you, but “little known”, “oft-neglected”, and “unknown” definitely sounds like the Bing Report Center to me. But I’ll caution you: ignore this resource at your peril. You can make up for 99% of the Bing Ads interface’s shortcomings by utilizing this tool.
Wait, check that…
You can make up for 99% 95% of the shortcomings of the Bing Ads interface through the use of this tool. Though, a note: the above Search term feature doesn’t contain conversion information, so you’ll still probably want to go with the Report Center in this case.
Personally? I make use of it on a weekly basis for the following tasks:
- Keyword Performance and Bid Changes
- Geographic and Device Performance
- Ad Performance/Ad Reviews.
- The aforementioned Search Query Report.
If you see the following image on a regular basis:
Then you should probably make use of the Bing Report Center.
That said, you can also get a few reports that are unique to Bing, that even allow for optimizations that AdWords is unable (or unwilling) to match. So we’ll talk about two of them today:
- Bing’s website URL (publisher) report
- Bing’s share of voice report.
Bing’s Website URL by Publisher Report:
Unlike Google, Bing is more willing to provide you with transparency to their search network partners. The knowledge of who is actually a Google search partner and where your ads are actually showing on their sites is maddeningly vague.
On the other hand, Bing is fully prepared to arm you with the knowledge of who their search partners actually are. You can find this information in the Bing Report Center, under the “Website publisher (URL)” report.
But why is this useful? Two reasons:
- You can segment out this traffic as needed— even having search partner-only ad groups if you want.
- If you’re in lead generation, it’s helpful to know which of these search partners will be responsible for bad leads. Because there’s a high likelihood that you’ll get some.
So, if you’re like me, and your client sends you an email saying that they received bad leads from the following sites:
Then you can find that information in the Website URL (publisher) report on Bing. One tip, though: be careful with your location settings if you have issues with Bing search partner traffic. If you’ve selected “located in” and “searching about” for your location settings, you may still get search partner traffic if users are searching about your product/location in a country that doesn’t have Bing. That issue drove me mad for a solid month until we figured it out.
Bing’s Share of Voice Report:
The other report isn’t unique to Bing— but that’s actually a strength in this case. This report gives you the same kind of Impression Share data you find in the AdWords interface, allowing greater insight to the available traffic for your account. Using both the Bing Share of Voice and Google Impression Share reports, you can pull off some pretty cool stuff.
Cool stuff like using Excel Solver to determine what your optimal budget is across both engines.
Using Sam’s method, you can actually extend this Solver function to determine what your optimal budget should be across both Google and Bing. This allows you to remove guesswork from budget allocation, instead relying on the data to dictate your best course of action. In practice, it looks a little something like this:
In the above example, we’ve got both our Google and Bing campaigns along with their Lost Impression Share due to budget metrics. Using Bing’s Share of Voice Report, AdWords Impression Share, and Excel Solver, we can determine that several of our Bing campaigns (and a few in Google too) should be getting way more budget. If you have multiple accounts in each engine, definitely give this strategy a shot!
What about you, PPC Heroes and Heroines? Any other favorite reports we’ve missed this week, Bing or otherwise? Let us know in the comments and, as always, thanks for reading!
