What’s New on Bing Ads?

Because Bing’s percent of total purchases, reservations, etc. varies from advertiser to advertiser, as does, quite frankly, the value and importance of advertising on Bing.

During an agency-wide touch-base with PMG’s Bing reps in March, we learned about several recent and upcoming enhancements that may provide more opportunities for advertisers to improve performance on Bing and/or make managing the platform easier. Below is a recap of what we learned:

1. Sidebar text ads have gone away

In the U.S., sidebar text ads ceased on March 26. They will continue to serve in other countries for now but may eventually sunset across the board.

Tests conducted by Bing showed positive results after sidebar text ads were removed:

“Excluding sidebar text ads drove overall click gains for advertisers, particularly for existing mainline text ads and product ads, with an immaterial impressions impact.”

You may be wondering, “What about other non-mainline ads?” Product ads will continue to serve on the sidebar, and bottom of page (BOP) ads will increase from three to four. And with that will come the removal of duplicate ads at the top and bottom of the SERP.

It’s important to note that these changes apply to the Bing SERP exclusively, not syndication partners such as AOL and Yahoo.

2. Price extensions are now available

These pay-per-click units show beneath the text of ads in position 1. They may not show every time an ad is served in the top position, but as many as 20 can be applied to any given account, campaign or ad group.

According to Bing, these extensions provide users with “exactly what they’re looking for when they’re looking for it… [helping] increase clicks and drive potential customers straight to converting experiences.”

Similar to AdWords promotion extensions’ promo requirement designations, Bing price extensions allow for price qualifiers. Dissimilarly, price extensions do not allow for an occasion tag (i.e. Cyber Monday) but do offer a 25-character header and a 25-character description (compared to AdWords’ 20-character item description only).

3. Negative keyword lists can now be imported from Google

You may (read: probably) have transferred campaigns built in AdWords to Bing using the import feature. There is now an option to choose which items to add, update or delete.

Bing recommends checking negative keywords after transfer, as the platform does not support broad match negatives.

4. There are new annotations for product ads

This clickable icon identifies high-quality advertisers. Eligibility is based on third-party fueled merchant rating scores, although high scores do not guarantee eligibility.

2. Price drop alerts (US, UK)

These are automatically applied based on detections from within an advertiser’s product feed.

3. Product ratings (US)

These are based on reviews from an advertiser’s site and third-party sources.

4. Free shipping annotation (US)

Now for some non-advertising related updates:

5. Intelligent image search makes pictures shoppable

Using the platform’s cropping tool, users can now identify a product within an image and shop other similar products instantly.

The new feature “leverages computer vision and object recognition… to detect and highlight different products within images.” To dive into the specifics, a magnifying glass icon located in the top right corner of an image allows users to select the product for which they want to see results.

On the knowledge front (as opposed to the shopping front), another new feature applies similar technology to inform users about landmarks within image searches, and — get this — even landmarks within images they upload. Once Bing identifies said landmark, it will then “share interesting information… such as the origins and other relevant trivia. For instance, why it was created and even what kind of stone it was made from.”

6. Intelligent answers provide users with multiple search results from across the web

First launched in December 2017 and powered by AI, intelligent answers help tackle questions/queries with multiple possible answers/responses.

According to a December blog post,

“If there are different authoritative perspectives on a topic, such as benefits vs. drawbacks, Bing will aggregate the two viewpoints from reputable sources and intelligently surface them to you on the top of the page to save you time.”

Pretty cool, huh? To take things one step further, a March blog post announced the addition of hover-over definitions for uncommon words.

7. Conversational search prompts users with clarifying questions to refine results

To help users sift through what can seem like an abyss of search results,

Bing’s “new way to search is interactive and can build on your searches to get the best answer… [with] clarifying questions based on the query to better refine the search and get the best answer the first time around.”

Like I said, not everyone thinks of or treats Bing in the same way. But will that start to change? We’ll see… As we like to say around the office, “Bing it on!”

Originally published at www.pmg.com on May 2, 2018.