If you ask anyone, even me personally, about the Bing ad center, you won’t get many flattering replies. The UI of ad Center looks cool but provides less functionalities and the keyword research tool is way backdated than Google AdWords. There is no doubt that in overall comparison, most online marketing experts will vote for Google, not Bing adCenter but if you take a completely neutral viewpoint, you may notice that there are some great features in Bing’s ad network as well. Google hasn’t adapted those features yet and as a result, Microsoft has an edge over its biggest competitor. Let’s find out some of those features. Search partner exclusion – I have checked a couple of new accounts in AdWords and adCenter and all of them have shut off the search partners. AdWords doesn’t provide much flexibility in the search partner department but its competitor provides search partner exclusion facility. The process is quite simple. Go to campaign settings and copy the list of search exclusions to “exclusions” list under advanced setting. You can also make the changes through the editor tool or the user interface’s “make bulk changes” option. If you want to generate the list, go to the “reports” tab and use ‘publisher performance’ report. Inside it, you will find a list of the search partners which you can mark as negatives. Remember that this is search traffic and hence your performance on these sites must be very good. Ad group level settings – Generally when I use AdWords, I follow ‘optimize for conversions’ or ‘optimize for clicks’ rotation settings. While this is quite useful most of the times, when I try to test in just one group, things become difficult because Google forces me to rotate everything. On the other hand, Bing ad center provides ad rotation facility as a group level attribute. Branded search terms – There has always been a heated argument about branded search terms. Should the trademark owners only be able to bid on their brand terms or should there be an open policy? adCenter found a solution of this problem and provides Rich Ads in Search service. Using this feature, companies can bid for their brand keywords and the result is a top position on SERPs. On the other hand, the competitor’s brand terms get a place on the right sidebar. Customer service – Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Google’s customer service is poor but after Yahoo-Bing cooperation, their service has become much better. Yahoo executives will provide you with immediate answers along with discussing the nitty-gritty of online ads more elaborately. Besides, Yahoo executives are not salesmen, but on the contrary, Google always tries to increase its income. Pixel length variation – The cookie window of AdWords pixels is only 30 days and there are no other customization options. On the other hand, Bing ad center lets you choose between 7, 15, 30 or 45 day pixel window. You can’t customize the number of days but still it offers more flexibility than AdWords. So, as you can see, Bing ad center certainly has some useful features and as long as the battle between Google and Microsoft continues, we will witness more great features introduced for these two major ad networks.
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