It has been proven many times, that it’s imperative to label a product or a service uniquely – without any similar-sounding name, to avoid the risk of having it confused with another thing. Bing Ads which used to be called adCenter, is all too familiar with this, and sadly at that. Using a mixture of terms so familiar to each other but with different meanings and reference, could lead to advertiser confusion which in the end can be very costly both for the advertiser and the advertising platform. In the case of Bing Ads, a lot of marketers cut back on Bing Ads with most of them severing ties with Bing altogether.
Unfortunately for Bing Ads because in reality, search campaigns running on Bing Network often results to a better ROAS compared to those run on Google AdWords, but because of lower volume Bing Ads suffered a “nice to have” but “no, thank you” kind of thing, despite its edge on the ROAS.
Bing Ads’ being so different from AdWords required a lot of different processes, additional learning and unfortunately, time, which was the biggest constraints on PPC teams. And Bing Ads suffered from not having a share of the advertising pie.
The Need to be Like AdWords
Having suffered too much, Bing Ads team finally realized that they have to do something about Bing Ads being different from AdWords. They have to clear the path of such difference and make Bing Ads to be more like AdWords. And that did it for Bing Ads. The decision to be more like the other entailed a lot of cleaning up and “parity” updates, one of which is to change the rules of engagement between Google and AdWords API users. Bing Ads users were allowed to import their Google AdWords accounts directly into Bing Ads.
At the time this was being implemented, Google AdWords API terms of service prohibited commingling of AdWords data with third party services. In effect, under this term, managing Bing Ads alongside AdWords by using the API is technically illegal.
Fortunately, platforms such as Kenshoo, Marin Software and Acquisio were able to find ways to help users without violating the terms. But they were not able to deliver a platform that would allow users to compare data from both search engines and decide on a budget based on the relative success of the ads running on both platforms. Microsoft challenged Google on this. That resulted to Google agreeing to make changes that would allow commingling of data. This signals a new era of innovation for performance marketing software companies ultimately benefitting marketers tremendously. Importing campaigns into Bing Ads can only take a matter of minutes.
Parity with AdWords Extended
When Google announced of the forced migration to Enhanced Campaigns, a lot of savvy marketers were not happy because that could mean loss of profit for them knowing they will lose control over targeting.
What Bing Ads did was to replicate Google’s Enhanced Campaign’s functionality to maintain parity with Google AdWords and as an added bonus, gave advertisers the choice to migrate to enhanced campaigns or to keep the old structure intact. This is in line with Bing Ads’ belief that advertisers should have the tools and flexibility to control their spending, choose their targets, and make sure that they get the best ROI.
And this is good news for everyone because the work smaller advertisers will invest in their Google Enhanced Campaigns will be importable “as is” into Bing Ads. Advertisers with deeper pockets will be able to continue to deploy campaigns with device and carrier specific targeting. And most importantly, Bing Ads will not stop at keeping up with Google to facilitate the flow of ad spend across AdWords and Bing Ads. And additionally, they will not stop at innovating as this is the only way that they can improve their share of search budgets – by being creative and adding more value to marketers.
