The unending wisdom of Martha Stewart tells us that “there are few rites of spring more satisfying than the annual clean.” In that spirit, PPC Hero’s April series will cover some aspects of your accounts that are worth a good cleaning. Structure, ads, negatives and more will all be covered.
In the busy world of PPC Accounts, taking a few minutes out to dive into Bing can often be overlooked. Bing can also be a dumping ground for quick and messy changes – a lot of the items you spend great time & consideration working through in AdWords don’t always necessarily get the same levels of love and attention in Bing. As much as we try and change it, it is a fact of PPC that your attention is drawn to wherever the majority of the action happens.
However, this shouldn’t be an excuse for getting lazy with your Bing accounts – there are a few really easy steps you can take to ensure you have everything all cleaned up and looking ship shape this week.
1. Copy all your latest work over directly from AdWords
Bing does a really good job of making life as easy as possible for you. You can sign into your Google Account through the Bing interface menu and then manually pick & choose any new campaigns you want to migrate over. There’s also an option to do this in the Bing Desktop Editor for those of you who prefer to work offline.
Once you decide to import from Google, you can manually select only new campaigns, keywords, negatives, ads etc.
Obviously not everything will be exactly the same – some things which worked on Google will not work on Bing, although generally with new campaigns, ads or keywords it makes sense to try them on both engines.
Bing mentioned at Hero Conf that support for Enhanced Campaigns is coming later in the year, and that they remain committed to keeping things as simple for you as possible on this front.
2. Check You Are Using Bing Sitelinks
To those of you who are, this might sound obvious, but I still come across a surprisingly high number of Bing accounts in which Sitelinks aren’t fully utilized. This is generally the case in older campaigns – perhaps seasonal ones which have been unpaused after a hiatus. You can copy these over from Google as above, or just create them through the interface. Again, this is a nice 5 minute check you can do that could potentially give you a nice lift.
3. Conclude Your Ad Tests
Another painfully overlooked item in Bing is unfinished ad tests. This normally results from copied AdWords accounts or simply not having enough time to go through your Bing ads on a regular occasion. It’s also a little trickier in this writer’s opinion to judge and change ads in Bing than Google due to the slightly different way their interface works, which can be enough to dissuade me from making all the changes I need to. At the very least, take your top 5-6 ad groups in Bing today and go and replace the worst performing ad in each of them.
4. Get Your Negative Keywords in order
Yesterday’s series post took a deep dive into cleaning up your negative keywords list. As Bing has always been a little more tricky to get ad group level negative keywords right with (lots more clicking around) I’ve found that people tend to ignore them in favour of just using campaign level. One piece of advice for when you do make some changes: it will save you a lot of time to do it through the Desktop platform! Finally, look for keywords that were added as negatives for performance rather than relevancy reasons – if these are hangovers from a Google account that particular combination of keywords might actually be fairly successful in Bing.
5. Download The Bing Ads Intelligence Tool for Excel
Rather than just tell you to take a look at your keywords, I’m going to try and convince you to download this awesome Excel plugin that Bing put together. The downside is that it doesn’t work for Mac yet (Bing if you’re reading please make this work on Office 2011).
You can do all kinds of cool stuff with it like look for historical trends in the volume of search queries on Bing, the demographic breakdown of searchers, the relative CPCs of those keywords etc. without having to switch from different sites to get it (no hopping from Google Trends to Google Keyword Tool).
6. Do a quick bid audit
The reason I emphasize this, and apologies for beginning to sound like a broken record, is because we tend to forget that what is true for Google isn’t always true for Bing. With competitiveness & traffic levels being different, your Google set bids probably won’t be appropriate on Bing. Download a keyword performance report and see if you can identify any areas to bid up & down today!
7. Check Your Search Partner Performance
One of my favourite things about the Bing Ads platform when compared with Google is that getting the details from their Search Partners is much easier to do. It’s also possible to exclude them on an individual basis (not just either on or off)!
To run this report, go into your Reports tab and select Website URL (publisher) from your performance reports. In your columns you’ll want to add conversions (or whatever your key metric is).
Once you download that report into Excel, you can filter to exclude Content Network and then pull a pivot table. More details on pivot tables here…
By grouping all of my partner sites together I can look for any that stick out as poor performers, and then manually exclude them in your campaign settings (see below):
If, like me, you run into issues with not having enough data, you can at least work out the value of your search partners (particularly valuable if you are budget limited). I grouped everything together to try and work out if it was worth stopping everything other than Yahoo & Bing, which in the below it appears to be as our CPA is much lower, at least until our budget is upped.
Hopefully you’ve found these quick tips & tricks helpful. Feel free to let us know in the comments if you have any good Bing spring cleaning tricks you utilize in your own accounts!
