Do you love using Google’s new and improved Keyword Planner to project what kind of traffic a hypothetical Ad Group might garner before implementing it? Does it frustrate you that this same mechanism isn’t available on Bing Ads? Well disband your frustrations, noble PPC managers! Last week Bing announced that their Bid Landscape tool is now available at the Ad Group level.

This tool will have two different modes: Default and Uniform.

Default

Here’s the poison of choice for account managers who prefer to operate at higher-levels, with a broader view. The default mode of the Bid Landscape tool will offer cost, click, and impression estimations for the entire Ad Group, based on a manually selected hypothetical ad group bid.

Uniform

Have you been nitpicking, fine-tuning, carping, quibbling and caviling with individual keywords bids, and now you’re sick of it? Uniform mode is just the ticket! Uniform mode parses your current bids, and then informs you whether or not performance for the entire Ad Group could be improved with a high-level bid change.

With their release, Bing offered some practical application examples. Awfully kind of ‘em. They specifically mention that the Bid Landscape tool is a great way to gauge and improve performance of top performing ad groups, but the reality is the tool can be applied to any ad group with available data.

Perhaps the neatest function is that in default mode the Bid Landscape will display how your keywords would have performed over the past 7 days if they’d been given a different bid. Say what you want about hindsight— it can be an ugly or beauteous thing— but it can definitely help you optimize your PPC account.

hindsight
Nothing like a healthy dose of hindsight to illuminate what could’ve been. (Jo Carter/Flickr)

Bing also recommends that the Bid Landscape tool be utilized to awaken sleeping Ad Groups. If your Ad Groups simply aren’t impressing, check the bid curve to see what you’re missing out on.

Bing does offer the disclaimer that all estimation data is based on the last 7 days of search query data, noting that this does not guarantee future performance. They also note that these features are available only in the United States for the time being, though they’ll be available elsewhere “in the near future”.  Sorry to our PPC fellows over-borders.

What do you think? Will you utilize this new level of application of the Bid Landscape, or do you trust in your own bid intuition? Tell us in the comments!

 Featured image by Benurs/Flickr.