The Bing Ads platform is wrongly ignored in many digital marketing circles as an unacceptable alternative to Google AdWords. While it is certainly locked into the second tier of the digital advertising platforms, Bing has a solid user base to serve ads to and lower costs-per-click than AdWords.
This would seem to make Bing an easy ‘quick win’ for digital marketers to hit, maxing out profitable search volume before moving on to the more expensive, but much larger Google audience… but instead Bing remains an afterthought for most marketing agencies, a neglected sideshow to the big-tent Google circus. What gives?
Some of this bad press comes from the digital marketing agencies and professionals who talk the loudest in this industry. While there are a few that defend and promote the Bing Ads, the simple fact remains that, for any professional who ‘grew up’ using the AdWords UI, The Bing Platform is going to feel clunky and uncomfortable. Simple issues with account management might not effect a ‘casual’ user who is managing a single account, but for agencies with dozens or hundreds of accounts these issues can quickly snowball into a rolling nightmare.
If Microsoft wants its ad platform to be the tremendous revenue machine that Google has, it will really need to turn online marketers into committed evangelists, and that means fixing core issues and turning the Bing Ads platform into a better alternative to Google AdWords.
Here are our suggestions – a Bing Wish List for 2016
- Platform Structure
- Improved Account Structure – Currently, accounts are all grouped together if they are linked under the main MCC, so notifications are MCC wide instead of account wide. Notifications should be filtered on the account level to avoid situations important notifications are missed on larger MCCs.
- Simplified Billing – Billing isn’t segmented within the MCC, even when you select a single account. This makes changing payment methods, reviewing account holds, reviewing invoices etc extremely difficult. Billing also takes you in circles back to the campaigns tab when you click the account title. The billing platform should be re-examined with an emphasis on MCC level users.
- Reporting
- Data-Driven Reporting – Currently, the emphasis in on the visual representation of performance data at the expense of actual numeral data. Visual reporting is great for doing a quick check-in, but more data is needed to make intelligent account changes.
- Easier Reporting -The reports tab is time consuming and extremely frustrating to use if there are multiple accounts under a single MCC. I don’t need to access client B data when working on client A. You have to select each attribute one by one each time, unless you save a meaningful report for later uses. This does not happen regularly as optimizing requires review of changing variables each time.
- Useful Dimensions – The dimensions tab is basically unusable because you can’t group data like campaigns, ad groups or keywords together. Viewing these dimensions in tandem allows marketers to draw better conclusions and create smarter campaigns.
- Missing Features
- Keyword labels
- Analytics data import or upload
- Shared budgets
- Revenue tracking through conversion pixel. This is very difficult to set up and setup documentation is lacking.
- Missing Campaign Types
- Display Network
- Display remarketing
