Why Do Microsoft Ads?
Every decent PPC agency needs a blog on, Why do Microsoft Ads (MADS)?
Having signed myself up to write a weekly diary entry for the first few months of DO MORE (mainly so my co-founder can do some SEO magic later for ourselves but also for you the reader to enjoy immensely of course) here are my top 10 reasons why you should consider MADS alongside Google Ads (GADS).
1) MADS has a 5-10% of UK Search Engine Market Share
When I have MADS active for clients in the UK with a similar campaign scale to GADS I tend to get 5-10% of the traffic / conversions that GADS achieves. As a general rule of thumb, I get a higher traffic % in the US and a lower % in other EU markets. Sometimes I do wonder why I bothered in certain EU markets at all TBH. Other times MADS is a true winner, makes me happy every time I look at results and has a very positive impact on top-line PPC metrics. This free tool from Similar Web helps with the research on search engine market shares by country although search volumes do differ greatly industry to industry. The best way is to try MADS out and see with real data if it works for you.
2) Getting Active On Many More Search Engines At Once
Worth mentioning MADS is not just powering Microsoft Bing searches but they have many smaller partner search engines such as Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo and more.
3) Potentially Less Competitive, Potentially Lower CPCs, Potentially Better ROIs
There tends to be less ad depth (number of competitors) om MADS because many agencies are frankly lazy or dysfunctional, clients have budget limitations where budgets get eaten by larger media such as Google, PPC managers are often too busy when in-house as they usually end up working across many channels / markets and finally MADS don’t have the same resources to acquire / support / educate advertisers that GADS has at its disposal. Of course its not always the case that average Cost per Click (CPC) is lower on MADS. That is an account to account nuance but I’ve had many accounts where Conversion Rate (CR) is high enough to offset higher CPCs so I’m still winning. Bottom line and probably the most important sentence of this whole blog is if you can get MADS working at a higher ROI than GADS this will benefit your blended ROI across search engines.
4) Supposedly Wealthier Audience
Fact or Fiction I don’t know but it is often accredited to older PC owners (thus more affluent as per wider societal wealth distribution) who stick with the default Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge browsers that came with their devices. Not just that, Cortana (the little search box on Windows 10 taskbar or popup on 11) uses Edge by default on billions of PCs worldwide. Few users bother to change it even if they prefer Google. Alongside there is A LOT of very popular hardware / software / websites powered by Microsoft Bing such as Alexa, Microsoft Office, Xbox, Gumtree and Amazon to name a few. Many searches from these I hypothesise to myself when PPC’ing are likely to be quite low funnel, hence the higher CR mentioned above in point 3.
5) Cross Search Engine User Journeys
Many users switch between search engines at different stages of their journey. You can check this in GA4 attribution paths by changing to campaign or source. Makes sense to me when you think about it. When users don’t get the quality search results they are looking for on Google sometimes they will switch to Microsoft Bing, or vice versa. Other users just have devices set up on different search engines as covered above. Of course some users just don’t like Google for XYZ reasons which goes back to point 1.
6) Leveraging LinkedIn Audiences
If your B2B now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn you can create specific audiences based on LinkedIn data which is pretty cool for B2B marketeers.
7) Brand Protection
Your brand traffic is also on Microsoft Bing so for the same reasons you run brand campaigns on GADS you will probably want to run them on MADS too. Why do brand bidding is another blog I have planned for the future.
8) Easy Import From Google
MADS have invested a load of engineering effort into allowing you to simply as possible import from GADS (and even Meta Ads although I’ve never tried it). But a word of warning don’t just import ‘willy nilly’ without checking all settings 1 by 1 as that can often lead to catastrophic PPC fails. For example you should add max CPCs and check all bids 1 by 1 afterwards as often there are random import bugs. Match types wise as a general rule of thumb [exact] is “phrase” on MADS, “phrase” is broad and broad is <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< pretty damn huge >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> and thus often pretty damn ineffective. You’ll need to change any tracking URL’s configured specifically for GADS too. If your nervous about MADS a top tip is to start off with just one campaign first and then update campaign budgets accordingly for 5-10% of what you have on GADS to control the risk.
9) The AI Paradox
Maybe should have made it 8 reasons but probably a 1/2 point in this one! In my personal opinion Microsoft Bing have gone big on AI for SERPS while not yet for the advertiser. Oppositely Google have gone big on AI for the advertiser but not yet the SERPS although that is changing fast as the AI race heats up. For now that’s good for me as I’m fond of a bit of old school PPC anyway on MADS and I like Google as my preferred search engine the way it is. i’d even go back to having +10 ads on the SERP so more advertisers had a chance of engagement per search result - maybe AI will take us back there one day.
10) Monopolies Are Not Healthy
Another 1/2 point! We love Google and here at DO MORE we certainly would not be in business without them so I write this with care. Google’s continued success has allowed them to achieve a +90% dominating market share which many would argue including government that its not a healthy situation for wider society. It should be mentioned that Microsoft are no saints here themselves so I’m not going down the lines of ‘lets get on MADS to be charitable to poor little Microsoft’. But in the case of search marketing I believe we want Microsoft around to help provide a worthy alternative source of information for consumers and the competition helps foster technological innovation across search. So if results are good on MADS then that’s good enough for me to support them.
