8 Reasons You Should Try Bing Ads and Give Google a Break
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When you think about sharing your story, products, or services through online ads, Google probably comes to mind first. And with good reason, Google is an excellent tool for capturing the attention of online consumers. But you're most likely overlooking another powerful tool for sharing your message: Bing Ads.
You may think advertising on Bing isn't worth your time and money and doesn't make enough of the market share to make a difference.
Well, if you think that, you'd be wrong.
Bing has about 36% of the U.S. Search engine market share. That's a considerable percentage of the population you will not reach if you ignore this engine. When you advertise on Bing, you can reach new and different clients that you may not have even realized you were missing.
Are You Ready to Get Loved by Bing?
That's one reason you should advertise on Bing — but it isn't the only reason. Read on for eight reasons you should try Bing ads and give Google a break.
1. Less Competition
We don't need to tell you how popular of a search engine Google is. If you're alive, you already know that. It has even been turned into a verb! So instead of Googling how to overcome the competition, try Bing. Many of your competitors will likely be ignoring Bing, which will cut your competition for clicks. Your ad will be more likely to break through the noise and reach your intended customer.
2. Cost
Where competition is cut, so is price. On Google, your average cost per click totals upwards of 20 dollars. On Bing, the average cost is around 8 dollars. This means that the price to acquire customers and the overall costs of your campaign will leave you with some spare change.
3. Extensions
Bing offers a feature allowing advertisers to share additional pages and links. Google does not provide these extensions. And although Google generally has a better CTR, these extensions help to boost CTR by up to 20%.
4. Audience
If your product or service skews to an older audience, then Bing is the search engine for you. Almost half of the users who search with Bing are above 45 years of age. Older users tend to do their searching on desktop (and often Microsoft) computers where Bing is big. If your audience is younger, chances are they are using Google on mobile phones. But age is not the only thing that sets Bing users apart.
They also tend to be more educated and affluent than the average Google users, which you need to consider when choosing where to advertise. If you only choose to advertise on Google, you will be missing many in this demographic, which you can't afford, especially if it happens to be your target demographic. Bing is also the search engine of choice for people when looking for products or services that require more lead time before buying, such as: automotive, real estate and travel purchases.
5. B2B marketing
If you're a B2B (or business-to-business marketer) you CAN NOT afford to overlook Bing. Bing is the only search engine that allows you to target people based on their LinkedIn characteristics. This is hugely valuable if you're selling a product or service to a specific type of professional. You can get hyper-specific about your buyer persona and then actually target that persona effectively with Bing advertising.
6. Integration with Microsoft
There's no arguing that Microsoft is a technology giant with hundreds of thousands of people interacting with its operating system daily. Those systems seamlessly integrate Bing. So anytime there's a search bar or a voice assistant (like Cortana or Alexa), they search Bing, not Google. And it's worth noting that most of the professional world is on Microsoft/ PC devices, where Bing is often the default. For instance, 44% of "all business and finance related paid search clicks occur on the Bing network."
7. Bing has friends
When you search on Google, you're just searching on Google. When you search on Bing, you're also searching "Yahoo!, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, MSN, Lycos, Search.com and ClassifiedAds.com." Bing is partnered with these smaller search engines to show more results to its users.
8. Growing international popularity
While Bing is still most popular in the United States, its popularity abroad is growing. According to a 2019 report, on average, the engine's popularity has risen 8% since 2015. We can only assume that number has grown larger in the three years since the data was collected.
Is Bing better than Google? We wouldn't go so far as to say that, but it does have its own unique pros and cons to consider. It doesn't make sense to completely rule it out, just because it is less popular than Google. You are doing a disservice to yourself and your company by ignoring Bing; it has undeniable perks ripe for the picking.
