If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve heard me mention Bing Ads as an alternative to Google Adwords.
…But why?
Isn’t Google the god of search?
Well, yes. With search results they rock.
But Bing Ads really is an awesome alternative to Adwords.
The Truth About Adwords
First, you have to understand Google’s business model. It works like this:
Google makes a crap-load of money from ad clicks
Here’s a chart of that. FYI…Google went public in 2004. The numbers are in billions:
Image Credit: Statista
Investopedia notes 77% of Google’s revenue comes from ads. The rest comes from Chromecast, Chromebooks, Play Store, Android, Google Apps, and Google Cloud.
Understand their business now?
So you can draw two quick conclusions:
- Google will focus on making its search results awesome for searchers because they need them to click and make Google money
- Google’s going to constantly work to boost its revenues from advertising
And they’ve certainly done the latter because they’ve done things like hiding organic search data in the past year. They’ll keep doing stuff like that to try to move businesses over to PPC.
So Why Use Bing Ads Instead? Doesn’t Everyone Use Google?
Well yes, Google dominates organic (free) search. Most searchers will stay there for the foreseeable future.
But, Bing Ads has many key advantages:
Bing Costs Far Less
WordStream, a company that specializes in PPC campaigns, averages a 33.5% cheaper cost-per-click with Bing. In addition, their clients often had better positions and higher click-through rates. Much of that success depends on the person or company you hire to manage your campaigns.
You Still Get Decent Search Volume
For many keywords, you’re still not going to have a shortage of interest. Bing partners with Yahoo on their ad network. They still have less combined search volume than Google. But you won’t starve for customers.
Bing’s Less Competitive
Competition drives up costs and makes clicks harder to get. Google has much higher competition than Bing. If you don’t want to deal with the competition, Bing makes sense.
You Get More Consistent Results on Bing
In many cases, your performance during your campaign stays more consistent for the duration. Makes sense. If competition’s higher on Google, you’ll have more advertisers fighting to push you out of your spot.
Plus, remember Google uses “Quality Score” to rank your ad. That also affects your costs. Do you think they tweak that to boost their revenue?
You’re naïve if you don’t.
Should You Always Use Bing?
This information may have surprised you. However, it doesn’t mean you should immediately run from Google to Bing. At the same time, this post lays out a good case for Bing overtaking Google’s advertising market share.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
For now, Bing’s worth a good, hard look if you’ve been using Adwords for some time.
