WebProNews

Tag: 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

  • Check Out Bing’s New iPhone App

    Check Out Bing’s New iPhone App

    Microsoft unveiled a new Bing app for iPhone, which it says will let users find and do things faster. According to the company, it goes so far as to “re-think search”.

    Take a look:

    “Mobile search is different from search on a PC. With mobile, we want instant answers and the ability to take immediate action,” says Richard Qian, CVP Bing UX Engineering. “We want to book it, buy it, watch it now. We want to touch more and type less. We want to search once in a single app. The new Bing app for iPhone helps you search and take action from one place so you can focus on the things that you want to find and do, rather than where and how to accomplish them. Here are a few examples.”

    Microsoft is touting the app’s use of app deep linking to help people find movies to watch and songs to listen to. Searching a movie might bring you app results from Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and/or Vudu, for example. For a song, you might be presented with Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, and/or Amazon results.

    “Ready for a night out? The Bing app helps you find the perfect restaurant,” says Qian. “Narrow down choices based on the things that are most important to you with our touch-optimized interface. Get reviews, menus, directions, make a reservation and get a ride right there from the apps you trust. And the night doesn’t need to stop there. We’ll help you find movies in nearby cinemas, and of course, you can book tickets right from the app.”

    Google is also doing more with apps on mobile search. The company announced today that it is utilizing its app indexing in a new way to actually display content from apps right in search results.

    Images 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 Announces Its Own Mobile-Friendly Tool

    Bing Announces Its Own Mobile-Friendly Tool

    As you’re probably aware, Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal earlier this year. Since (and even before) doing so, the company has provided webmasters with a tool that lets them check their pages to ensure that they are indeed mobile-friendly. This is something that’s probably largely taken for granted as Google doesn’t give you tools that let you know if you pass the test for all of its signals.

    Bing has also indicated it will take mobile-friendliness into account when ranking web pages, and today announced the launch of its own mobile-friendliness tool.

    “The Mobile Friendliness Test tool runs checks on all of these key factors and additionally checks for and reports on resources that are needed to analyze the page fully but that we weren’t able to crawl due to robots.txt constraints,” Bing says. “This way rendering issues (as seen in the page preview) can be fixed by webmasters by updating robots.txt in such a way that Bing can accurately determine the mobile-friendliness of the sites.”

    “When you submit the URL of a page to be analyzed to the Mobile Friendliness Test tool, our Bing Mobile crawler fetches and renders the page, extracting important features that are used by the tool to determine how the page performs against each of the above factors,” it adds. “The outcomes are then aggregated into a consolidated mobile-friendliness verdict for the page.”

    Bing lists the following as factors it considers with regard to mobile-friendliness: viewport and zoom control configuration; width of page content; readability of text on the page; spacing of links and other elements on page; use of incompatible plug-ins. You can get more details about each of these here.

    Image via Bing

  • 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

  • DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite Adds Bing Shopping Campaigns

    Google announced that Bing Shopping Campaigns are now part of the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite.

    It’s always heartwarming to see Google adding support for more Microsoft offerings isn’t it?

    “Bing Shopping Campaigns for Bing Ads make it easier and faster to advertise your products from your Bing Merchant Center store online,” says DoubleClick Search product manager Henry Tappen. “This streamlined way of getting Product Ads up and running on Bing is also driving meaningful impact for advertisers.”

    “With the addition of Bing Shopping Campaigns to the DoubleClick Search Commerce Suite, you can easily extend the reach of your product-focused advertising,” says Tappen. “You’ll be able to manage, automate, and measure Bing Shopping Campaigns using the full range of DoubleClick Search tools, the Performance Bidding Suite, Adaptive Shopping campaigns, and Purchase Detail reports.”

    There’s a guide to setting up Bing Shopping Campaigns with DoubleClick Search here.

    The addition joins several other new features Google announced for DoubleClick Search last month, including mobile and tablet bid adjustments for Bing Ads campaigns.

    Last week, Microsoft announced 5 new features for Bing Product ads 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.

    Image via Bing

  • 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 Profitable, Microsoft Reports

    Bing Profitable, Microsoft Reports

    Bing is now profitable. Microsoft’s search engine has struggled to generate profits since it’s introduction in 2009, but the company reported its FY16 Q1 earnings on Thursday revealing that search accounted for over $1 billion.

    CFO Amy Hood said during the earnings conference call, “Search revenue increased to more than $1 billion this quarter and we passed an important milestone as our search business reached profitability.”

    She later added, “In search, we expect Bing’s strong trajectory to continue, remaining profitable for the remainder of the year.”

    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.”

    Microsoft beat reporter Mary Jo Foley explains at ZDnet, “Microsoft has been working to streamline its search and advertising business business for months. Earlier this year, the company handed off its display advertising business (and possibly 1,000-plus of its employees working in that business) to AOL. The company also opted to get out of the map-data-collection business and sold off those assets and about 100 employees to Uber; its new strategy is to license/display other companies’ mapping data.”

    Meanwhile, Bing has been frequently upping its game in terms of ad offerings. Recent months have seen changes to the Bing Merchant Center, improvements to Accounts & Billing, the launch of a new Marketplace Trends visualization tool, new automation features for Bing Ads, the announcement of the Bing Ads Keyword Planner, improvements to conversion tracking, and new remarketing capabilities.

    Image via Chandler Dances on Things

  • 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

  • Bing Ads Gets New ‘Notify Me’ Automated Rules

    Bing Ads Gets New ‘Notify Me’ Automated Rules

    Microsoft announced a ew type of Automated Rules for Bing Ad Campaigns called “Notify Me,” which send advertisers emails for campaigns, ad groups, adds, and keywords that match their search criteria.

    Bing uses the example of setting one to alert you for campaigns that have spent over $500 this week or for ad groups that have a Quality Score that has fallen below 5 or 10.

    rules1

    To set one up, just go to the campaigns tab and click “Automate,” and then “Notify me when…” You can make the rule run on all enabled campaigns, all campaigns, or only on the ones you have selected.

    Regarding the “when” options, “Bing says, “Any filter options and performance data already available are also available here. We only want this rule to run on campaigns that are out of budget. Do this by selecting Delivery contains Out of budget.”

    You can also define the date range for any performance data you want to filter on.

    When your rule runs your search criteria and finds a match, you’ll get an email with a link to a report listing all the matches found. The rule can be automated like any other Automated Rule by clicking “Automate” and “manage rules”.

    The new rule type can be found in the Automate menu in the Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, and Keywords tabs.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Ads Gets Marketplace Trends Visualization Tool

    Bing Ads Gets Marketplace Trends Visualization Tool

    A few days ago, Bing launched the Bing Ads Marketplace Trends Interactive Website, which is designed to help advertisers get a better look at data in different areas including device targeting, ad scheduling, and location targeting.

    These include interactive charts that let you drill down into different industries.

    Screen Shot 2015-08-14 at 12.09.53 PM

    They just officially announced the site, saying this about it:

    One of the coolest things about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is the ability to get your information in front of potential customers when they’re actively searching for the very products and services you provide. Unlike TV ads and billboards where you just pick a popular show or a high-traffic area and hope for the best, you can actually choose your keywords and your target audience to pinpoint those most likely to be interested in making a purchase decision… hopefully, from you.

    What if you could take it even further than that? What if you really fine-tune your PPC campaigns by drilling down into more specific metrics, such as volume trends related to device targeting or ad scheduling? What if you could look at location targeting trends and filter cost-per-click (CPC) and click-through rate (CTR) within each state by industry and sub-industry?

    The site shows consumer clicks, volume, and targeting trends in ways it hopes will enable advertisers to make better business decisions. So far, it’s earning praise from several industry blogs.

    According to Bing, it could help you gain a competitive edge.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Ads Gets Accounts & Billing Improvements

    Bing Ads Gets Accounts & Billing Improvements

    Microsoft announced that it’s making some changes to accounts and billing for Bing Ads. It’s all in direct response to advertiser feedback.

    “From insertion order edits to bulk management, from one-stop-shop billing to consolidated invoices – all designed to help you do more, work less,” says Bing’s Vaishali De. “Whether you’re already using Bing Ads Accounts and Billing, or you’re transitioning over from Yahoo, we think you’ll like what you see. We’re partners in this, so please keep the feedback coming – we’re just getting started!”

    With each Accounts & Billing tab, you can get a quick view across all of your accounts or dive into specific ones. You can switch between pre-pay and post-pay payment options without being locked into one.

    There are also new IO management features.

    “There is no better time to start creating and managing your insertion orders online,” says De. “This fast, simple process now sports the convenience of creating and managing IOs in bulk across your accounts, getting instant approvals, the ability to edit existing IOs, and track your IO change history. For those of you who like the paper trail, you can also easily print the IO details.”

    With the billing tab, you can see a summary of your charges as well as more granular data. You can also opt into consolidated billing to get one bill for all accounts (if they use the same currency and language).

    They’ve also made invoices easier to read with the option to have campaign-level charges included. You can also now sign up to get them through email as soon as they’re generated.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Merchant Center Is Getting Some Changes

    Bing Merchant Center Is Getting Some Changes

    Microsoft announced some coming improvements to Bing Merchant Center, which merchants use for creating stores and catalog feeds for Shopping Campaigns and Product Ads on Bing.

    There are changes to feed structure, which the company says it made so advertisers can manage all their feed programs across platforms more seamlessly. It explains in a blog post:

    Delimiter rules on product_category and product_type columns are changing. Soon we will only be accepting “ > ” (with a trailing and leading space) as a valid delimiter. Any other value will be treated as invalid and we won’t split the terms .

    Accept Unicode characters in the ID (merchant product ID) field. Previously the ID column would only accept alphanumeric characters, now we are starting to accept all valid Unicode characters in that.

    Updating Taxonomy for product_category . We are revising our taxonomy to be in line with your other feed programs. Please take a look at the below links as some of the categories have changed quite a bit. With this revision we will also be supporting IDs instead of string values. For example: The use of “305” will be supported instead of “Electronics > Video > Computer Monitors”.

    There’s a new graph that lets you view the status of all your items within a store. It shows colors for active, rejected, expiring, and awaiting review. You’ll be able to see the status for all ads within a store for the past 30 days. There will also be graphs for the total number of impressions received and the total number of clicks received by all your ads within a store in the past 30 days.

    graphs

    They’re also expanding historical data to show the past five catalog feeds and corresponding reports.

    catalogs

    Finally, they’re adding dual upload support using the Content API. In the past, you’ve been able to either provide product data with the API or via TP upload/Manual Upload/Automatic Download methods. Going forward, you’ll be able to do both.

    Microsoft talks more about all the new features here.

    In semi-related news, Amazon is suddenly retiring its Product Ads. It sent an email informing advertisers that the’ll be retired on October 31.

    Images via Bing

  • Bing Warns Searchers About Fake Online Pharmacies

    Bing Warns Searchers About Fake Online Pharmacies

    Bing is rolling out a new search feature that warns people who may be about to buy some bad medications.

    Online pharmacies offers customers cheaper, more available drugs – and this can be a dangerous combination. The Food and Drug Administration keeps a list of fake online pharmacies called the Internet Pharmacy Warning Letters, and Bing is using that to warn searchers when they travel to those sites.

    “When there is a significant risk of serious harm to the public from purchasing unsafe, counterfeit and other illegal drugs online, the Bing team wants to help our users make informed decisions. With this goal in mind, we are rolling out a new set of warnings on Bing.com to give our customers more information about the dangers of visiting unsafe online pharmacies,” says Bing.

    Here’s what you will see if you are trying to navigate to one of the sites on the FDA’s list:

    Screen Shot 2015-08-07 at 9.08.10 AM

    “The list of online pharmaceutical sites for which we are providing warnings will grow and evolve. We will continue to refine our efforts in this area and look for more opportunities to help our users make more well-informed decisions as additional, highly-reliable sources of information become available to us,” says Bing.

  • Microsoft Says Windows 10 Will Help Your Holiday Bing Ad Campaigns

    As you may know, Microsoft launched Windows 10 this week. It has Bing built into it, and the company expects a billion to be on Windows 10 by 2018. It also expects to see Bing query volume gains from 10 to 15 percent as early as September. It expects this to grow both from new users who have upgraded to the new operating system as well as current Bing users who will use it more frequently as a result of its integration.

    “Windows 10 puts Bing and Cortana at your service when and where you need them, without having to leave what you’re doing to launch a browser – even if you can’t spell or type,” explains David Pann, GM of Microsoft Search Advertising. “For example: The new task bar on the Windows 10 desktop is a direct line to Cortana (and Bing). Spoken or typed web searches now bring up Bing search results,which includes relevant ads. When users launch the new Microsoft Edge browser, they will see the brand new MSN – optimized for search. Only Edge has Cortana built right into the address bar.”

    “At Microsoft, we understand that the best screen is always the one consumers are on. As their lives become more mobile, they want to take experiences with them,regardless of device or operating system. Your customers can now access what they love, wherever they are and on whatever device they are using,” adds Pann. “The Cortana app, for example, will connect users’ devices to their PCs, seamlessly buzzing them with reminders, answering their questions and acting as their very own personal assistant. With the Cortana app on iOS and Android, Bing will draw in new users, and continue to expand our overall search and mobile search share.”

    Because of all of this, he says Bing Ads is “poised to deliver more for your business”. In other words, you can expect Bing search volume to ramp up just in time for your holiday search ad campaigns.

    Microsoft is counting on growth in Bing traffic for the foreseeable future, so you probably should too.

    Last week, Bing launched native ads on MSN for search marketers. Earlier this month, they also made Bing Shopping campaigns available to all U.S. customers.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing, Like Google, Will Now Yank Revenge Porn Results

    Bing, Like Google, Will Now Yank Revenge Porn Results

    Microsoft has joined Google in taking a stand against revenge porn. The company has announced that upon request, it will pull search results from Bing that direct users to sexually explicit content shared without the subject’s consent.

    It’ll also remove content from OneDrive and Xbox Live.

    “Much needs to be done to address the problem. As a first step, we want to help put victims back in control of their images and their privacy. That’s why Microsoft will remove links to photos and videos from search results in Bing, and remove access to the content itself when shared on OneDrive or Xbox Live, when we are notified by a victim,” says Microsoft Chief Online Safety Officer Jacqueline Beauchere.

    Microsoft says that any links or content removed will be removed globally.

    To help with this, Microsoft has set up a dedicated reporting page with a form to ask them to remove a nude or sexually explicit photo or video that’s been shared without consent.

    “Clearly, this reporting mechanism is but one small step in a growing and much-needed effort across the public and private sectors to address the problem. It’s important to remember, for example, that removing links in search results to content hosted elsewhere online doesn’t actually remove the content from the Internet – victims still need stronger protections across the Web and around the world,” says Beauchere.

    In June, Google added revenge porn to the short list of things it removes from search results.

    “Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results,” said the company.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Bing Launches Native Ads On MSN For Search Marketers

    Microsoft announced the beta launch of Bing Native Ads, which let advertisers target intent outside of search. According to the company, the strongest intent signals on the web are users’ interests expressed by prior search queries, signals from the content of the experience in which they’re at at any given point, and user actions like looking for products or taking actions on advertiser sites.

    Bing’s new native ads make use of all of these and combine them with “naive experiences,” which the company says are relevant and natural. Here are some examples on MSN:

    bing-nat

    msn1

    msn2

    The ads also offers the same targeting or bid boosting functionality that’s already available from Bing Ads. This includes location, device type, time of day, day of week, and site remarketing.

    “Bing Native Ads is a native offering optimized for search advertisers,” says Bing’s Raj Kapoor. “Therefore ease of use for search advertisers is a key aspect of the product design. Search advertisers focus their efforts on optimizing the relevance and ROI of their campaigns using search ad platform workflows, interfaces, and reporting. The management and controls for Bing Native Ads are fully integrated with standard Bing Ads workflows, and all the advertiser interfaces, reporting and conversion tracking available from Bing Ads platform are available for Bing Native Ads. This makes it very easy and effortless for search advertisers to take advantage of this native offering and expand their reach targeting user intent.”

    “Bing Native Ads are designed to deliver good ROI for advertisers leveraging intent signals & algorithms, and also come with bid modifiers for advertisers to manage their participation in and ROI from native ads,” Kapoor adds.

    The ads will display on MSn in the U.S. at first. Presumably they’ll be expanded to other markets later in the year.

    Images via Bing