Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the most widely used channels of digital marketing across all industries. When we talk about SEM, most of the time it is understood to be just Google Ads and nothing more. This results from Google dominating the search engine landscape and constantly having a market share of more than 85%. However, that’s not the only option available. Today, we will explore the much underrated Microsoft ads or Bing ads and understand why they may suit your marketing needs.

Functionality

Similar to how Google Ads show up on Google search and all the other websites/apps on their partner's network, Microsoft ads show up on LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and various partner sites.

In addition to the usual search, display and video ads, Bing offers you a chance to target users even before they open their browser. This is possible through the Smart search ads which show ads to the users who use the Windows operating system and initiate a search from the search bar in their taskbar.

Reach

While Bing and Microsoft do not have a massive worldwide reach on the same scale as Google, they still manage to get more than 900 million visitors and 11 billion searches. This is still a massive audience to target and the audience available here may not completely overlap with the audience available on the Google partners network.

Cost

Just because the reach for Microsoft ads is not as high as it is for Google Ads, all is not lost. While the cost associated with digital marketing in both Google Ads and Microsoft ads varies from industry to industry, research has shown that more often than not, the average cost per click on Microsoft ads is anywhere between 35 - 50% lower than Google Ads.

When it comes to creating a digital marketing strategy for small and medium businesses, while Bing may offer a much smaller reach, it may be more advisable for businesses with lower budgets to spend at least a part of their budget on Bing rather than entirely spending it on Google Ads.

Control

Bing lets you designate several campaigns in various time zones, unlike Google Ads. This makes complex ad scheduling techniques much simpler to manage in Bing, especially if your campaigns are global.

The network, location, ad scheduling, language, and ad rotation parameters in Google Ads must be specified at the campaign level, and ad groups are only allowed to use the campaign-level options. However, Bing ads makes these settings available at the ad group level, letting you rapidly modify a configuration for a specific ad group without having to start a brand new campaign.

Given that in terms of ad formats, everything that is available in Google Ads is available here, the choice comes down to things such as choosing between reach vs cost. So after you have compared Bing ads vs Google Ads for all the above reasons, it is worth exploring the Microsoft/Bing ads and seeing whether it would actually work for your business.

Schedule a call with our experts and discover how we as a Search Engine Marketing Agency can help create the perfect search engine marketing strategy that allows you to draw the maximum out of all platforms.

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The trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Idecution Marketing Studio LLP does not claim any intellectual copyright over or intend to use it for any commercial purposes whatsoever. This blog is only meant to provide information to the digital marketing community.