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Tag: Bing Ads

  • Bing Ads Get Social Extensions For Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Tumblr

    Microsoft announced that Bing Ads is now testing social extensions in the U.S. These are a new type of ad extension that advertisers can place under their copy to direct potential customers to their social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Tumblr. These can go to accounts or specific social posts.

    “Businesses today spend a lot of time and resources to engage customers on social media and use paid search to drive traffic. Bing Ads team believes it’s time to build a bridge between two,” says Bing Ads Platform program manager Aurea Astro. “We believe driving potential customers to your presence on social networks to join a conversation will allow you to engage customers more directly. Brand marketers can push engagement levels using traffic coming from search to social. Customer Relationship Managers who want to push customers to social for help and/or info especially in “real time” scenarios can do so easily.”

    “Using social extensions in combination with other ad extensions can symbiotically increase both your ad’s CTR and your customer engagement,” Astro adds.

    Google used to have social extensions, but these simply showed Google+ follower counts. The company announced that these would be discontinued just in December.

    Given that Google+ obviously didn’t catch on as Google hoped that it would, it’s no surprise to see this feature go away from AdWords. Bing’s version of Social Extensions, however, makes a lot more sense given that many more people actually use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

    Images via Bing

  • Microsoft Adds New Tracking Parameters for URLs in Bing Ads

    Microsoft announced some new tracking parameters for URLs in Bing Ads. There are three new tags – {Campaign}, {AdGroup} and {Network}. Advertisers can add these to their landing page URLs to see where ads are appearing and what is triggering them to appear.

    “We understand how important it is for advertisers to gain additional insights about their paid search clicks,” says Microsoft’s Jamie Chung. “The more data you have, the easier it is to fine tune your campaign settings to improve performance that can help you reach valuable customers more easily.”

    “Dynamic text tags are powerful because Bing automatically will replace these tags with information relevant to the click so you can perform analytics and build richer reports about your landing pages,” Chung adds.

    Screen Shot 2016-03-08 at 9.08.16 AM

    You can see all Bing Ads URL tracking options and parameters here.

    Last week, Microsoft updated the Bing Ads Editor with native ad support and some additional features.

    Images via Microsoft

  • Microsoft Updates Bing Ads Editor With Native Ad Support And More

    Microsoft announced the release of Bing Ads Editor version 10.9.1, which includes support for Bing Native Ads, faster ad extension imports, and improved editorial messaging.

    Advertisers can now quickly make Native Ads bid adjustments to campaigns and ad groups from the edit pane or directly from the grid, and bids can be changed from -100% (to opt-out) to +900%.

    This feature is rolling out gradually.

    “We have made improvements to the editorial messages shown for policy violations,” says Microsoft’s Prince Bajracharya. “If your ads, keywords or ad extensions are disapproved, in addition to a message, you’ll also receive a link to the most relevant editorial policy page for further detail and assistance on the appropriate action.”

    The update replaces showing the term that was flagged and the rejection reason summary.

    As mentioned, there are now faster ad extension imports. According to Microsoft, we’re talking five times faster.

    Images via Microsoft

  • Bing Ads Gets New Keyword Diagnosis Tool

    Bing Ads Gets New Keyword Diagnosis Tool

    Microsoft announced that there is a new inline keyword diagnosis tool in Bing Ads that gives advertisers information about their keywords without having to click around a whole bunch.

    Just go to the Keywords tab in the Campaigns page and locate the keyword of interest, and hover over the ellipsis icon in the Delivery column to get the pop-up for keyword diagnosis.

    The pop-up dialog box has three sections: Keyword diagnosis result, Keyword quality score, and Link to ad preview and diagnostics.

    “If your keywords are triggering your ad, you’ll see ‘Yes,’ otherwise, you’ll see ‘No,’ along with an explanation of the suggested reason and a recommended action,” Microsoft says in a blog post “‘No’ reasons will fall into one of these categories: setting (e.g. negative keyword, paused keyword), editorial issue (e.g. disapproved keyword, keyword pending review), quality (e.g. low ad relevance, low expected CTR), or bid and budget (e.g. low bid amount, campaign out budget).”

    Under the diagnosis result, there’s a breakdown of your quality sfore by Expected click-through rate, Ad relevance, and Landing page experience.

    “Under Quality Score, we’ve added a link to the Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool in case you want to preview your ads and/or conduct any further diagnosis,” Microsoft explains. “If you do access the Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool from this link, you’ll find the context (keyword and targeting options) already filled in, to save you the time and effort of memorizing and inputting them manually…”

    You can see examples and get more info on the tool here.

    Last week, Microsoft launched the Bing Network. More on that here.

  • Microsoft’s Bing Ads Apps Just Got A Lot Better

    Microsoft’s Bing Ads Apps Just Got A Lot Better

    Microsoft announced some new features for its Bing Ads iOS and Android apps. These include a visualization for Share of Voice, a way to understand how competitive you are using Quality Score, and some tablet optimizations.

    For Share of Voice data, there’s a new pie chart visualization. This shows the percentage of ad impressions you may be losing to competitors or other factors. You can find it on the Dashboard screen under the performance graph. You’ll get more info if you tap Share of Voice.

    “Traditionally a report that you would run from the Reports tab in Bing Ads Web, the pie chart gives you a much more simplistic rollup at the account level,” explains Microsoft’s Jamie Chung. “It is easier to see visually where your campaigns are falling short and where you can make improvements later on. Swipe through the carousel to see how each statistic contributed to your lost impression pie or tap an individual stat to focus more in.”

    You can see a detailed breakdown of the impression Share of Voice stats provided in the apps here.

    When it comes to understanding how competitive you rare using Quality Score, Chung says, “We’ve now surfaced this metric on the campaigns, ad groups and ads grids. Bing Ads calculates how competitive your ads are in the search marketplace by measuring the relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages to your audience with its Quality Score metric. Quality Score is a weighted value between 1 (underperforming) and 10 (outperforming) used by advertisers to track the performance of changes they make to their ad copy and landing page to make them more relevant to their target audience.”

    Microsoft goes in depth about Quality Score here.

    As far as tablet optimization, there are optimized views for the campaign grid.

    In other Bing Ads news, Microsoft unveiled the Bing Network as it moves on from the Yahoo Bing Network.

    Images via Bing, Google Play

  • Microsoft Unveils The Bing Network

    Microsoft Unveils The Bing Network

    The Yahoo Bing Network is no more, and Microsoft has now introduced simply The Bing Network.

    As you may recall, last year, Microsoft and Yahoo announced some major changes to their search and advertising partnership. This is a result of that reduced (but still existent) relationship.

    Microsoft’s Stephen Sirich says in a blog post:

    At Bing, we’re building a platform that gives people “knowledge for doing” in a more natural, predictive and personal way. It’s the intelligence that spans not just across Microsoft products but across platforms and across partners. Bing Network connects you to the moments that matter by being in the products people use every day.

    With the transition of all U.S. accounts (and with them, people and account management) from Yahoo to Bing, the Bing Network also represents an expanded network of partners, including AOL, Wall Street Journal and more, adding more searches and clicks to the network every day.

    Bing’s growth has been on the rise in recent months.

    According to the company, the Bing Network includes 60 million searchers that can only be found there. A quarter of its clicks are exclusive to the Bing Network, including unique searches versus Google, it says.

    It also counts the growth of Windows 10 and syndication partnerships with AOL, GumTree, The Wall Street Journal, and Infospace among its assets. Windows 10 is reported to be installed on about 200 million devices.

    You can read more about what Sirich has to say about the Bing Network here.

    Image via Bing (YouTube)

  • 4 New Features In Bing Ads Keyword Planner

    Microsoft announced some enhancements to the Bing Ads Keyword Planner tool to give advertisers more insights into their campaigns. There are four new capabilities.

    First is new competitive insights and benchmarking. Advertisers can now review relative ad impression share for keyword suggestions in addition to search trend, competition, and suggested bid information as previously provided. Advertisers can compare their ad impression share to competitor domains and market leader domains.

    Second is customizable ad group and keyword bids.

    “In the traffic estimates page, you can change the bids (in the ‘Max. CPC’ column) for individual ad groups and keywords and then see the traffic estimates based on them,” explains Microsoft’s Jessica Cui. “If your keywords have different bid amounts, the bid landscape graph will show the estimated performance and spend for each bid percentage change. To adjust all your bids by the same percentage, just hover and click on the desired percentage directly in the graph.”

    Third is a new source for keyword suggestions. In addition to seed keywords you can use for searching for new keywords, you can now input the URL of specific landing pages on your website (or your whole site) to get more suggestions.

    Finally, the new version of Keyword Planner lets you customize time range up to 24 months for keyword search volume.

    “We got a lot of asks about customizing the result by date range instead of the default last 12 months after Keyword Planner was released in September….now it’s available!” says Cui. “You can now set the time period up to last 24 months to get a more holistic view of the keywords trending year over year. Thus, you can allocate your budget for the coming period by referencing performance history. This should be especially helpful when running a seasonal campaign and need to look for trending keywords; you can get suggestions that are particularly relevant during certain period of the seasonal event.”

    All features are now available when you sign in.

    Image via Bing

  • Microsoft Releases Bing Ads Tax eBook For Agencies

    Microsoft announced that it has put together a new eBook for tax season aimed at giving agencies tips and insights to help their tax-related clients’ improve their search campaigns.

    According to the company, electronic filing has increased 30% since 2009 with 120.6 million people filing electronically last year. They also note that less than 6% of Americans are unemployed, saying filing volume will be high this year.

    “Tax season is here, and many U.S. residents want to file their 2015 tax returns as soon as possible to get their refunds to help pay off holiday bills, make home improvements and start planning vacations,” says Bing’s Michelle Fears. “Searches peak in early February when people get their W2s and again in April as the filing deadline approaches. This may be a niche segment of your client portfolio, but it’s one that can yield huge returns on PPC ads given the audience’s strong reliance on search.”

    “Did you know that tax services is a $9.3 billion industry in the U.S.? Did you also know that the IRS does not advertise? It’s true, so tax season offers a wealth of opportunities for tax related businesses,” Fears says. “Last year nearly 90% of invidual tax returns were filed electronically, which means filers are most likely searching online for products and services.”

    You can check out the eBook here and find additional resources at Bing’s Agency Hub.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Talks 2016 Search Predictions, Looks At ’15 Trends

    Bing Talks 2016 Search Predictions, Looks At ’15 Trends

    Microsoft is talking up the importance of search to marketers looking for “smart brand connections”.

    In doing so, it shares a look at the top marketing buzzwords searched in the U.S. last year:

    David Pann, General Manager of Microsoft Search Advertising goes on to make seven search predictions for 2016. These boil down to:

    1. Search marketing will harness the majority of digital marketing spend

    2. Search as critical to informed real-time business decisions

    3. Search will drive marketer productivity and claim a bigger stake in the marketing mix

    4. Paid Search advertising strategy will go beyond the keyword to audience and action buying

    5. Mobility is the realm of personalization

    6. Voice search drives new behavior and understanding for marketers

    7. Using data to predict outcome

    Pann elaborates on each of these (quite a bit actually) in his post, so give it a read.

    Bing, as you may know, now powers AOL Search worldwide and because of this got some updates to Bing Ads. More on that here.

    Images via Bing

  • Here’s What’s Changing With Bing Ads Now That It Includes AOL

    As you may know, Bing now powers AOL Search worldwide, including exclusively in the the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. In light of this, Microsoft announced some changes to Bing Ads including the Campaigns page, Reporting page, Google AdWords Import experience, and Keyword and Campaign Planners.

    The Campaigns page has new options for Campaign Creation and Ad Group creation to include ad distribution for AOL network.

    Changes to the Reports Page include:

    – a new value to the Network column for AOL Search

    – new values to the Top Vs. Other column for AOL Search-Top and AOL Search-Other

    – actual website URLs displayed as separate line items (not consolidated) for AOL owned and operated websites in the ‘Website URL’ column of the ‘Website URL (Publisher)’ report

    “If you have made changes to your network distribution prior to January 1st, 2016, your old values and new values in Change History will be updated to include the AOL network,” says Bing’s Prince Bajracharya. “However, please note that your ads have been served only on Bing and Yahoo properties before January 2016. This will also happen to the data in the Change History tab.”

    Network distribution options in Bing Ads Editor now include AOL network in all three options.

    When you use the Google AdWords Import tool, All Search Networks will now include AOL Search in addition to Bing and Yahoo and syndicated partners.

    With the Keyword Planner, the options for Network targeting have changed to include AOL network in all options. Campaign Planner now calculates AOL into traffic.

    For more on all of this, read Prince Bajracharya’s post on the Bing Ads blog.

  • Bing Ads Gets New Mobile Campaign Monitoring Features

    Microsoft announced the launch of two new features for campaign monitoring on iOS and Android: favorites and push notifications for Automated Rules.

    “Favorites are meant to be a super quick, simple and easy way for you to monitor what you care about the most,” Microsoft says. “Want to quickly reference your top holiday campaigns? Star them using Favorites. How about that top performing keyword that you are obsessed about? Star it using Favorites.”

    “The best part is that the next time you use the app, the new Favorites tab lists everything in one centralized place so you don’t have to go spend time fishing for those for campaigns,” the company adds.”

    Advertisers can now use Notify Me rules as a way to get notifications for campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords that match certain criteria they’ve defined. Based on existing automated rule email settings, advertisers can be notified via push notification every time a rule runs, only if there are changes or errors, or only if there are errors.

    The updates are now available for both operating systems.

    Images via Microsoft

  • Bing Maps Gets Traffic Cameras

    Bing Maps Gets Traffic Cameras

    Microsoft announced the launch of traffic cameras in Bing Maps. Yep, you read that correctly.

    “Seeing is believing,” the company says in a blog post. “Here at Bing Maps we know the value of traffic information, however, there is something to be said about being able to see the current road conditions. We are proud to announce that you can now view more than 35,000 traffic cameras across 11 countries in Bing Maps.”

    Users can access these views by turning on the traffic layer (by clicking “traffic”) on a map. From there, you’ll get traffic info overlaid on roads on the map, and you can zoom in to bring up traffic cameras where available.

    “Want to compare a few cameras? No worries, we’ve got you covered. Simply return to summary and we will show your Recently viewed cameras. Now the cameras you check for your daily commute are ready and waiting,” Bing says. “As you can tell, we are very excited. Integrating the Clearflow traffic prediction algorithm was just the tip of the iceberg. Now we are showing traffic cameras. Can you believe this all started as a data-driven experiment? Neither can we, however, this is just part of the innovative culture we embrace at Bing Maps.”

    It’s unclear where all exactly the feature is available, but it definitely is in Seattle.

    Image via Bing

  • Microsoft Launches Bing Ads Elite SMB Partner Program

    Microsoft Launches Bing Ads Elite SMB Partner Program

    Microsoft announced the launch of a new program for SMB Bing Ads partners who have “proven their competence” when it comes to bringing success to small and medium-sized businesses. It’s called the Bing Ads Elite SMB Partner Program.

    The company considers partners to be among those with an in-depth understanding of the search advertising landscape and Bing Ads solutions in particular.

    “They are committed to providing high quality support and service and have the expertise, technology and skilled workforce to ensure that SMBs succeed with the Bing Ads platform,” says Microsoft’s Shivi Saxena.

    Partners are required to be a Bing Ads trusted advisor to a large base of small and medium businesses, meet the Bing Ads Elite Partner Product Certification requirements, and maintain a required number of Bing Ads Certified Professionals.

    Partners also must have an infrastructure to regularly provide billing and reporting to a large base of customers, and they must be able to participate in Microsoft and Bing Ads partner events and training sessions.

    “Microsoft and Bing Ads are committed to providing world-class service SMBs around the globe to empower them to do more,” says Saxena.

    Bing Ads will provide trainings, quarterly business reviews, dedicated account management, invitation to product ideation sessions with product teams, joint marketing programs and partner events, performance-linked incentives, and access to technology and APIs to perform bulk operations.

    More on the partner program here.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Tells You How Not To Get Kicked Out of Bing Ads

    Microsoft took the time this week to highlight some things that will get Bing Ads advertisers in trouble. Most of this is common sense stuff, but it’s worth looking at, especially considering the company thought it warranted a new blog post.

    They do daily reviews of Bing network results and of the keywords and ads submitted by advertisers to make sure they comply with Bing Ads policies. Non-compliance can result in account closure – permanently in some cases. Non-complaince reasons are listed as follows:

    – that include viruses, malware, spyware, or other self-installing programs.

    – Business models that attempt to mislead site visitors, or that seem deceptive or fraudulent.

    – Sites that misrepresent the origin or intent of their content and as a result are likely to deceive a portion of the target audience.

    – Phishing sites that try to trick visitors into sharing personally identifiable information (PII), or where the use of such information could cause the user to be defrauded or sites that share download keys for Office, Windows and other software.

    – Pages that consist entirely of advertising, or whose main purpose is to direct site visitors to advertising.

    – Link farms.

    – Sites operated by advertisers who consistently violate our Editorial Policies.

    ** Only advertisers promoting content in violation of high risk policies, e.g. Pharmaceutical or Gambling, are at risk for account closure.

    – Advertisers that submit large numbers of irrelevant keywords—even if their landing pages don’t violate the Relevance and Quality policy.

    ** This behavior is categorized by pervasive use of completely irrelevant keywords (generally trending or popular keywords) where there is no related content available on the landing page.

    As the company notes, it may place restrictions on ads even of it doesn’t close the advertisers accounts. It could, for example, add blocks on keywords, adjust quality scores, or reject keywords, ads, or landing pages altogether.

    For more on he Dos and Dont’s of Bing Ads, take a look at the post.

    Bing has finally become profitable for Microsoft. They don’t want bad ad practices screwing things up.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Microsoft’s Bing Ads Get New Image Extensions

    Microsoft announced on Monday that Bing Ads now offers Image Extensions that can help advertisers capture user attention and increase clicks.

    Advertisers can upload up to six images alongside their ad copy and other extensions.

    “Visuals can help set your ad apart. Image extensions are a way to visually promote your product or service, help increase traffic, raise brand awareness and elicit better quality traffic by showing searchers up front what to expect when they click your ad,” says Bing’s Pankesh Jhaveri. “In addition to a larger ad footprint that using image extensions provides, you can add other extensions to provide additional callsv-to-action and increase the likelihood a searcher will click your ad and head over to your site.”

    “Finally, with Image Extensions, you have the option to provide a unique URL for each image served, so you can customize where you point potential customers,” Jhaveri adds.

    Image extensions are available across all Bing Ads markets for display on both PCs and tablets.

    Microsoft is also working on bulk upload capabilities and Bing Ads Editor support for image extensions. They’re also experimenting with multi-image layout and combinations of display text and description. Stay tuned for more on that stuff.

    Images via Microsoft

  • Bing Ads Editor for Mac Coming In The Summer

    Microsoft announced that it’s working on a Bing Ads Editor for Mac, which will be coming early next summer.

    “Bing Ads Editor for Mac will make it easy for Mac users to use Bing Ads Editor to manage their search marketing campaigns on the platform of their choice A PC will no longer be a requirement for getting more done in paid search campaign management with Bing Ads,” says senior program manager Devang Gandhi.

    They’re also adding new features and redesigning the interface.

    “In this version, you will be able to manage multiple accounts with ease. Add as many accounts as you want and download campaign data for multiple accounts simultaneously, right from the accounts manager window. You will also be able to open each account in a separate editor window and drag/drop or copy/paste entities across account,” Gandhi explains. “Using the simplified navigation under the account tree, you will be able to access your location targets or sitelinks extensions with just one click. The list will also display the number of entities of each type within the selected scope making your campaign management tasks a lot easier.”

    The offering will be available to all advertisers globally in the summer. We’ll keep you posted on further related announcements in the meantime.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Ads Academy Training Program Announced

    Microsoft announce the launch of Bing Ads Academy, a new training program for advertisers to learn how to get more out of Bing Ads. There are courses for both newer customers and those who have been at it for a while.

    Bing Ads Academy consists of both online and in-person courses. They’re offered to premium customers working for agencies, as well as channel partners and tool providers.

    “Whether you’re brand new to PPC and need our 101-level content to get up to speed on the basics of setting up and running your first campaign, or if you’ve been managing PPC campaigns for years and want to get 301-level expert tactics for maximizing your return on investment, Bing Ads Academy can help,” says Bing’s Tina Kelleher. “If you’ve ever attended a webinar or a Bing Ads Connect event, then you already have an idea of what you can expect with Bing Ads Academy: on-demand virtual classrooms, as well as live, in-person trainers who will dive deep on specific topics to help you become more proficient in your Bing Ads campaign management and optimization skills.”

    “Because Bing Ads Academy is intended for people working in the premium segment of agencies, channel partners and tool providers, the primary content focus is on topics relevant to ‘Sellers’ (who pitch Bing Ads as a media buy to their clients) and ‘Do-ers’ (those who work within the Bing Ads platform on a daily basis),” Kelleher says. “The ‘Sellers’ will gain a better understanding of why Bing Ads is a smart buy for their clients and the ‘Do-ers’ can hone their ROI skills with specific strategies and tactics based on key features in Bing Ads.”

    Trainers include Eric Couch, Monica Orsino, Rachel Rogowin, and Purna Virgji. They all have extensive industry experience. You can learn more about their backgrounds and credentials here.

    Bing Ads continues to be an increasingly better business for Microsoft with the company recently reporting that it has turned a profit.

    “In search, we expect Bing’s strong trajectory to continue, remaining profitable for the remainder of the year,” said CFO Amy Hood.

    CEO Satya Nadella noted that Bing’s share is up to 20.7% in the U.S. with ad revenue growing 29% worldwide, helped by Windows 10 users asking Cortana over a billion questions. He later said, “I’m very, very excited obviously about what’s happening with Bing.”

    Images via Bing Ads, Chandler Dances on Things

  • Bing Product Ads Get 5 New Features

    Bing Product Ads Get 5 New Features

    Microsoft announced the launch of five new features for Bing Product Ads. These include: support for used and refurbished products as part of the inventory, product ads on Bing Mobile, share of voice reporting with impression share metrics, catalog statuses available via the Content API, and Bing Shopping Campaign availability in UK and Australia.

    Advertisers selling pre-owned products can take advantage of the Used and Refurbished products support. Use the Condition field to display the right condition of your products in the catalog feed file, and upload your product catalog of Used and Refurbished products.

    Create product groups by using Condition as the attribute and choose New, Refurbished or Used as the values, and differentiate bids for Used and Refurbished products from New products. You can track performance for Used and Refurbished products with Product Partition and Product Dimension reports.

    Product Ads on Bing Mobile appear on Android and iOS.

    “To help you optimize your Bing Shopping Campaigns, we are excited to announce the availability of Share of Voice reporting using Impression Share metrics,” says Bing in a blog post. “This metric represents the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your product groups, offers, and campaign settings.”

    “If you have been using Content API to manage your inventory on Bing Merchant Center, you will be very pleased to know that you will now be able to pull the status report for your catalogs that you submitted via the API,” Bing says. “We hope that this will make your job of managing the product inventory easier and help you maintain a healthy state of offers on Bing.”

    More on the API here.

    More on all of the new features here.

    Images via Microsoft

  • Bing Ads Get Remarketing Capabilities (Finally)

    Microsoft announced that remarketing in Bing Ads is now available to advertisers. This lets you target people who have visited your website before.

    “Remarketing gives you the power to do more than ever with Bing Ads data, to deliver the right ad to the right user at the best ROI,” says Bing’s Kalyan Nanduru. “Dozens of early users have seen great returns and we can’t wait for you to give it a try and let us know how it works for you, too. As a new targeting enhancement to optimize your Search and Shopping campaigns, remarketing is especially fitting for advertisers looking to get the most out of the coming holiday shopping season.”

    “Remarketing is a second change to engage visitors to your website after they’ve left,” adds Nanduru. “As a valuable addition to your audience targeting toolbox, remarketing gives you another avenue – and another chance – to reach your customers.”

    The company gets more into the benefits and set-up of remarketing in a blog post here.

  • Bing Makes Improvements To Conversion Tracking

    Bing Makes Improvements To Conversion Tracking

    Bing announced some new improvements to conversion tracking in Bing Ads aimed at speeding up and simplifying workflow and helping advertisers boost ROI.

    The new stuff is in direct response to feedback from advertisers about Universal Event Tracking, which Bing launched nearly a year ago. People found the workflow for setting up UET and conversion tacking confusing and time consuming, so they’ve decoupled management of UET tags and conversion goals, improved revenue tracking, added inline alerts, and added help popups throughout the user interface.

    “Functionality to manage both UET tags and Conversion Goals was previously embedded in Goals and Conversions page under Shared Library,” says Bing’s Kalyan Nanduru. “There was no way to create a tag without creating a conversion goal or view all the tags created in a centralized manner.”

    “In this release, we have decoupled UET Tag and Conversion goal management into separate pages, UET Tags and Conversion Goals, respectively,” Nanduru adds. “In order to improve discoverability, these two new pages are listed under a new node called Conversion Tracking that has been added to the left menu (at the same level as Shared Library).”

    In terms of improved revenue tracking, advertisers now have more control and insight into options for tracking, like so:

    The alerts appears as reminders of next steps that appear as you go through the workflow.

    To help advertisers improve ROI, they’ve added support for unique conversions. When you create a conversion goal, there will be two options: all and unique. There are also now account level conversion goals.

    Advertisers can now verify if their tags and goals are functional right in the Bing Ads user interface and can now see the number of conversions, revenue, and repeate rate for each conversion goal in the Conversion Goals page.

    Nanduru gets into more detail about all of this as well as a few other new features here.

    Images via Bing

  • Microsoft Announces Bing Ads Keyword Planner

    Microsoft announced on Wednesday the release of the new Bing Ads Keyword Planner, described as “a one-stop shop” for building new campaigns and improving existing ones.

    The tool is accessible in the advertiser’s Bing Ads account by simply clicking Keyword Planner in the menu.

    Keyword Planner helps advertisers find new ideas for targeting and filtering as well as find a profitable bid and budget.

    “You can get new keyword and ad group suggestions based on terms that are relevant to your product or service, or through multiplying lists of keywords,” explains Bing’s Jessica Cui. “Historical statistics such as search volume trends and marketplace competition intensity are provided to help you decide which keywords to use for your campaign. The relevant keywords with good traffic but relatively medium or low competition should be good candidates for your campaign with a return on investment goal. You may also be interested in finding more specific long-tail keywords which don’t have much search volume, but are more likely to drive conversions.”

    “You can refine your keyword suggestions by location and network targeting, filter by historical statistics, keywords to include or exclude,” Cui adds. “You can also see your search volume breakdown by device or location in your targeted locations or down to state, DMA or city level in a visual graph to understand the expected contribution from individual devices or locations. If you already have a list of keywords, you can enter them manually or upload them as a CSV file to get an idea of how popular those keywords have been, or group them into ad groups.”

    Read the announcement for more on comparing bids/budgets and creating new campaigns/adding to existing ones.

    The Bing Ads Keyword Planner is available starting today.

    Image via Bing