Sometimes Bing is an overlooked ad network, despite being a primary one. If you research it as an alternative to AdWords, you’ll find many comparisons of their costs and features, and plenty championing of one over the other.
Still, Google dominates search ad spending with almost $50 billion in revenue and more than 55 percent of the market share, according to eMarketer.
For some organizations, it actually makes sense to use both. If you’re in the auto industry, Bing’s ad network is one you don’t want to miss. Further, the platform recently announced an update that will save you more time when transferring from AdWords to Bing.
Let’s talk about why you should give Bing a chance, and how to implement it as an addition to your AdWords efforts.
Demographics of Bing Automotive Searchers
It might be easy to dismiss Bing when deciding where to put your digital ad dollars. Google has become so prolific … When you need information you “Google it,” but how often do you “Bing it”?
However, some hard data on who’s actually using Bing might change your mind. The search engine shared details on what they’re delivering, and to whom, for the auto industry:
In June of 2016, Bing delivered 66 million automotive searches from 21 million automotive searchers. 17 million of those searchers were not reached on Google. Bing claimed 38 percent of automotive paid clicks.
Who are these Bing searchers? The demographics give us a sense of the personas, and they’re more varied than you might expect. Just over half of the searchers are male (52 percent), and just under half are married (44 percent).
Regionally, the largest group of searchers are in the South Atlantic area of the United States (20 percent). The next largest groups are in the Pacific (17 percent) and East North Central (14 percent) regions. New England has the smallest group of Bing searchers (5 percent).
By age, Bing searchers are across the board. The largest age group, at 20 percent, is 45- to 54-year-olds. 18- to 24-year-olds make up the smallest age group.
The vast majority of Bing users, 76 percent, have some sort of post-secondary education, whether that means attending college without graduating or completing grad school. Only 2 percent haven’t graduated from high school.
Almost one-third of them make $100,000 or more annually. This is notable for automotive brands who want to advertise higher end cars: your audience is on Bing.
As you can see, there are all kinds of people using Bing for automotive searches. This is an opportunity for any auto brand.
Easily Transfer Your Automotive AdWords Campaigns to Bing with This New Feature
Bing knows that even these demographics aren’t necessarily enough to get advertisers to switch from Google AdWords, or add Bing as another ad platform. Creating these campaigns is also about the time investment, so they came up with another solution.
Bing’s import feature allows advertisers to easily bring their Google campaigns into the Bing platform. For the most part, the imports are seamless, though Bing suggests users review bids, budgets, targeting options and negative keywords to be certain everything is set up as you want it.
Recently, Bing updated the feature to allow automated imports from Google AdWords. With regular imports, advertisers had to go in and manually make any AdWords updates in the mirrored Bing campaign. Now, you can set the imported campaign to import immediately, in the future or on a recurring basis (daily, weekly or monthly).
If you choose to import your AdWords campaigns on a recurring basis, the Bing campaigns will automatically synch with any AdWords updates you’ve performed in the meantime, saving on time and minimizing human error.
Bing also provides a summary of your import activity and schedule where advertisers can review, edit and fix errors caught during the synching process. The announcement of the automatic imports ends with a reminder of Bing’s ongoing development, including improvement for multi-language targeting – something to be on the lookout for as well.
For now, you can learn more about Bing and success for automotive campaigns by checking out this presentation for digital auto advertisers.
If it’s in your budget to add Bing to your digital advertising strategy, consider how much time this new import feature can save you. Between that and the promising demographics for automotive searches, this is something auto brands don’t want to miss!