Updated January 11, 2023
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AdWords Isn’t Everything
The PPC world is dominated by Google’s AdWords, but that isn’t the end of the PPC world. As well as numerous social media related PPC platforms and native ad tools, both Bing and Yahoo also offer their own versions of the AdWords platform. Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini allow users to place ads for their products or services on their search engines. What’s that you say? “But nobody uses Bing!”. Well, that’s where you’re wrong.
Who Uses Bing Anyway?!
Google’s name might be the first thing that comes to mind when somebody says ‘search engine’, but that doesn’t mean that they have a monopoly of the search market. Searches on Yahoo and Bing combined make up around a third of all searches. So if you’re not advertising on anything other than Google, you’re automatically missing 30%+ of your potential market.
As to ‘who’ uses Bing or Yahoo. While it might seem like everyone is using Google there are many people who aren’t. Some examples are users of Microsoft products that have Bing set as their default search engine, or older web users who may be using Yahoo because ‘they’ve always used yahoo’. Another situation could be in an office environment. Many workplace computers will be locked, so the ability to change default browser has been removed. If you’re not advertising on either platform, these are the type of searchers you might be missing.
What’s the Difference
Once you’ve set up your accounts on Yahoo or Bing you’ll notice that there is very little difference between their platforms and the AdWords platform (at least before the recent interface update that Google have rolled out). So setting up your account doesn’t require a great deal of effort. Especially as they both have a feature that allows you to import your campaigns from Google AdWords. If you do use the import tool, you will have to check the ad groups and keywords though, as the import isn’t always 100% accurate.
The devil is in the detail and there are some small changes between the platforms which require a little bit more attention, for example, the way you set up display ads on Bing is slightly different and can leave you accidentally running them. So take care in the Settings section of each platform to make sure you’re doing exactly what you want.
Do You Run Bing Ads or Yahoo Gemini?
If you run accounts on all three, or just two, of the main PPC platforms we would love to hear what you think of them. Do you notice any demographic differences between conversions from AdWords and Bing Ads?
Photo credit – Top: Joe The Goat Farmer
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