WebProNews

Tag: Bing

  • Bing Ads Launches Enhanced Sitelinks

    Bing Ads Launches Enhanced Sitelinks

    Microsoft announced the launch of Enhanced Sitelinks for Bing Ads, two years after Google made its version available to the world.

    Microsoft has been piloting the feature with a few advertisers over the several months, and says performance has been “phenomenal”.

    Microsoft’s Eliot Li writes, “Most of you are probably familiar with Sitelink Extensions. We have seen our advertisers benefit from this feature tremendously. Enhanced Sitelinks is a new format of Sitelink Extensions that allows you to add up to two lines of customizable, descriptive text to your Sitelink Extension. The result is a larger, more relevant and descriptive ad, and a more captivating ad format by which to attract your target audience.”

    “Only high-quality ads serving in the top position in the ad block above the algo results will trigger Enhanced Sitelinks. Therefore, make sure you focus your efforts on high performing campaigns such as your brand term campaigns first,” says Li. “We are still experimenting with how to optimize the user experience for Enhanced Sitelink across the Yahoo Bing Network (YBN). For that reason, a portion of the network has not yet been enabled for Enhanced Sitelinks until we have determined the optimal user experience.”

    Bing expects most of the U.S. traffic in the Yahoo Bing Network to serve Enhanced Sitelinks in the coming weeks. The feature is only available in the U.S. for now, and will whit other markets later this year.

    Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the launch of Dynamic Sitelinks for Bing Ads.

    Image via Bing Ads

  • Bing Ads Gets Close Variants In Exact Match

    Microsoft announced that it is rolling out the inclusion of close variants in exact match for Bing Ads in the U.S. This means exact match will now include minor grammatical variations like plurals, abbreviations, acronyms, spacing, and misspellings.

    Microsoft’s Matt Bisson writes on the Bing Ads blog:

    Based on our prior testing, we found that exact match close variants helped to drive more highly qualified click volume to your campaigns, improving your presence on the queries that were the most relevant to your products and services. In aggregate, tests resulted in a 2-3% increase in exact match clicks without impacting your ROI.

    Exact match close variants has been designed to match your ad to queries that represent exactly the same intent to those you are already using. The close variants feature does the work to optimize for you, ensuring that your ad shows when the query varies only slightly from the keywords you have already selected.

    Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that Bing Ads would now include close variants in broad match.

    Both moves follow the one by Google to add close variant matching to all exact and phrase keywords, which some advertisers weren’t thrilled with, as they felt it gave them less control over their campaigns.

    In other Bing Ads news, there is a new dynamic site link feature, and you can now share negative keyword lists among campaigns.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Adds A Couple Features For iOS 8

    Apple released iOS 8 last week, and many apps are adding features that take advantage of its specific capabilities. These include Microsoft’s Bing app, which has added a new translation feature and the ability to put Bing’s daily homepage image and trends on the Today screen.

    “With this release, we were able to take advantage of the extensibility possible in iOS 8 making it easier to extend the reach and functionality of Bing on iPhone,” the company says.

    With the update, you can translate webpages from the Bing app or from Safari. From the Bing app, just tap the Share icon, and select the Translate button. From Safari, you’ll need to manually add the Bing Translate button to your options.

    “Swiping from the top on your iPhone brings up the Today screen, which can now host the beautiful image of the day and trending stories from the web,” Bing says. “With this information available at a glance, we hope to save you time while informing you about what’s going on in the world. To enable this feature, tap ‘Edit’ on your Today screen and add Bing.”

    You can grab the latest Bing app update in Apple’s App Store.

    Apple said they sold over ten million of the new iPhones over the course of the first weekend of availability, and the iOS 8 update is available for the iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPod touch 5th generation, iPad 2, iPad with Retina display, iPad Air, iPad mini, and iPad mini with Retina display. So far, 46% of applicable devices are updated to the new OS, according to Apple.

    Images via Bing

  • Bing Ads Lets You Share Negative Keyword Lists Among Campaigns

    Microsoft announced that you can now share negative keyword lists between campaigns in Bing Ads. You can do this with the Bing Ads Editor, the web interface, or the API.

    “Gone are the days of manually copying negative keywords between campaigns,” says Microsoft’s Anar Alimov. “With this release, you can create lists of negative keywords and apply them simultaneously to as many campaigns as you want. You can add up to 5,000 negative keywords per list, and create up to 20 lists per account.”

    “Associating a negative keyword list does not subtract from that campaign or ad group’s own limit of 10,000 negative keywords (see the table below),” says Alimov. “For example, you can have 10 negative keyword lists with 1,000 negative keywords each, and associate all of those lists with one campaign. The campaign itself can still have an additional 10,000 negative keywords of its own.”

    Shared lists are only able to be created at the account level and applied to the campaign level. You can use the feature by signing in, clicking the Campaigns tab, and selecting “Shared Library”.

    Microsoft has a step-by-step guide on how to use the feature here.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Bing Gives Image Search A Makeover

    Bing Gives Image Search A Makeover

    Microsoft announced that it’s rolling out a new user experience for Bing Image Search, which adapts based on query, resolution, and interaction. Here’s what it looks like:

    Image results will now expand to the full width of the screen, and will include exploration suggestions dynamically according to screen resolution.

    “This means an uncluttered first page where images are the hero. You’ll also notice that images have higher fidelity and are cropped and altered less to better inform your click,” Bing says.

    “The experience is great with touch,” it adds. “On your Windows 8 device or iPad, try swiping through one of the inline carousels (more on these later) or clicking on an image and swiping your way through more. Everything is touch friendly, responsive, fast and fluid – look out for a post next week detailing Bing’s touch and iPad friendly features. These improvements will soon come to Kindle and Android tablets as well.”

    It also now has a mini-header that slides in after you scroll down, and gives you ways to change a queries or topics. Suggestions change as you scroll. There’s also a new hover experience, and it shows a link with a search glass icon for many images. This gives you a way to search for more related to specific images.

    In other Bing news, its ads now include Dynamic Sitelinks like Google’s.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Ads Get New Dynamic Sitelinks Feature

    Microsoft announced a new Dynamic Sitelinks feature for Bing Ads, which it says can help improve relevance and click-through rates for SMB advertisers.

    Once again, Bing is following Google’s lead on ads, as the search giant launched a similar feature for AdWords in July.

    “Dynamic Sitelinks are clickable text additions to your ad that help enrich and enhance the information you’ve already supplied through your headline and ad copy,” explains Microsoft’s Matt Bisson. “While you would pay for a click on your ad’s headline, as this is dynamically created for you any clicks that occur on the Dynamic Sitelinks appearing within your ad are at no cost to you whatsoever.”

    “If your display URL domain has deep links information available, then you may be a candidate for Dynamic Sitelinks,” he adds. “Content that’s highly relevant to a user’s search query is pulled from your ads’ landing pages through the Bing algorithm as a means of providing your potential customers with a sneak peek at some of the more specific information that they’ll find, should they click through to your site. This supplementary information can help attract more clicks and increase user confidence in the relevancy of your ads at no cost to you, the advertiser.”

    There’s an FAQ about Bing’s Dynamic Sitelinks feature here.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Bing Ads Get Better Location Targeting, Ad Scheduling

    Microsoft announced some updates to Bing Ads aimed at improving location targeting and ad scheduling. Now included are: ad scheduling in fifteen-minute increments, zip code targeting and exclusion, radius targeting improvements, a new geo location report, user experience improvements for location targeting, intent only targeting, and better city level targeting.

    “In addition to these user-facing updates, there are also several improvements in the Bing Ads platform to improve location targeting,” explains program manager Piyush Naik. “Most notably, we have made significant improvements in accurately detecting searcher’s location through various location signals. This will you help reach your target audience with greater precision.”

    “These updates to our targeting feature set are not designed in isolation, but rather in a comprehensive and all-inclusive manner after listening to which improvements matter most to you. We certainly hope these updates will help you to be more productive in Bing Ads and in achieving your business goals,” Naik adds.

    The company discusses each of the features in more detail here.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Reveals URL Keyword Stuffing Spam Filtering

    Bing revealed in a blog post this week that it rolled out an update to its algorithm a few months ago that targets URL keyword stuffing. They had alluded to such an update in another recent post.

    Igor Rondel, Principal Development Manager for Bing Index Quality writes:

    Like any other black hat technique, the goal of URL KWS, at a high level, is to manipulate search engines to give the page a higher rank than it truly deserves. The underlying idea unique to URL KWS relies on two assumptions about ranking algorithms: a) keyword matching is used and b) matching against the URL is especially valuable. While this is somewhat simplistic considering search engines employ thousands of signals to determine page ranking, these signals do indeed play a role (albeit significantly less than even a few years ago.) Having identified these perceived ‘vulnerabilities’, the spammer attempts to take advantage by creating keyword rich domains names. And since spammers’ strategy includes maximizing impressions, they tend to go after high value/ frequency/ monetizable keywords (e.g. viagra, loan, payday, outlet, free, etc…)

    Approaches commonly used by spammers, as Rondel lists, include: multiple hosts with keyword-rich hostnames; host/domain names with repeating keywords; URL cluster across same domain, but varied host names comprised of keyword permutations; and URL squatting.

    Rondel notes that not all URLs containing multiple keywords are spam, and that the majority actually aren’t. For this reason, Bing is using its new detection technique in combination with other signals.

    “Addressing this type of spam is important because a) it is a widely used technique (i.e. significant SERP presence) and b) URLs appear to be good matches to the query, enticing users to click on them,” he says.

    Bing isn’t giving out all the details about its detection algorithms to prevent abuse, but does note that it takes into account things like: site size; number of hosts; number of words in host/domain names/path; host/domain/path keyword co-occurrence; percentage of the site cluster comprised of top freqeuncy host/domain name keywords; host/domain names containing certain lexicons/pattern combinations; and site/page content quality and popularity signals.

    Via Search Engine Journal

    Image via Bing

  • Microsoft Gives MSN A Big Overhaul

    Microsoft Gives MSN A Big Overhaul

    Microsoft announced a new rebuilding of MSN, which is geared toward a “mobile-first” and “cloud-first” experience.

    The top of the page includes quick access to what Microsoft is calling the “Services Stripe,” which includes email, OneDrive, OneNote, Facebook, Twitter, Office 365, and Skype. The page also includes tools like shopping lists, a savings calculator, a symptom checker, a 3D body explorer, etc.

    “One of our goals was to make it simple to personalize what you want to see regardless of which device you use,” says Brian MacDonald, Corporate Vice President, Information and Content Experiences at Microsoft. “In the coming months, we will release a suite of MSN apps across iOS and Android to complement our corresponding Windows and Windows Phone apps. You only need to set your favorites once, and your preferences will be connected across MSN, Cortana, Bing and other Microsoft experiences. Whether it is your watchlist of stocks in MSN Money, your favorite sports teams in MSN Sports, or your recipe collections in MSN Food & Drink, those things will always be with you at your PC at work, on your iPad in the living room, or on your Android phone when you are on the go.”

    According to TheNextWeb, Microsoft’s Bing mobile apps are actually being rebranded as MSN.

    “Throughout all of the categories in the new MSN, including News, Sports, Money, Travel, Food & Drink, and Health & Fitness, it is a key tenet of MSN that every experience provide a global, comprehensive perspective from thousands of worldwide, authoritative sources,” says MacDonald.

    The company partnered with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, AOL, and Condé Nast in the U.S. as well as others internationally.

    The new MSN experience is available in preview at preview.msn.com.

    The company discusses what the overhaul means for advertisers here.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Getty Images Sues Microsoft Over Bing Image Tool

    Getty Images is suing Microsoft over a tool the latter recently launched enabling people to embed slideshows of images from Bing Image Search on their websites.

    The tool is called the Bing Image Widget, which Microsoft describes in the following manner:

    Bing Image Widget enhances your web site with the power of Bing Image Search and provides your users with beautiful, configurable image collages and slideshows. What’s more, Bing Image Widget is easy to configure.

    You can get the code by going to the Bing Image Widget page or via Bing Webmaster Tools. Just copy and paste the code onto a page, and adjust the settings to meet your needs, and then you get a collage of images. I’d embed one here, but we wouldn’t want to get sued.

    It basically just looks like a group of image search results. It’s nothing spectacular, and I doubt that it’s being used very much. I know I haven’t been seeing it in use.

    Either way, Getty has deemed the tool a “massive infringement” of copyright images, according to Reuters, which reported on the suit earlier.

    As far as I can tell, if you click on any of the small thumbnail images that appear in the widget, it just takes you to the image search page. It’s not like you are clicking and viewing a full-sized photo on the webpage the widget is embedded on.

    The tool was just released on August 22nd.

    Earlier this year, Getty launched its own tool for users to embed some of its images on their sites.

    Image via Bing

  • New Top Movers Report Added To Bing Ads

    New Top Movers Report Added To Bing Ads

    Microsoft announced the launch of a new Top Movers report for Bing Ads to let advertisers figure out account clicks and spend variations, and find which campaigns or ad groups see the biggest changes. It can also help them understand the causes.

    “A ‘top movers’ list is up to 10 campaigns and/or ad groups that have experienced the largest performance change— by size, not percent— during two specified time frame,” explains Jing Li on the Bing Advertising blog. “With this list, you can quickly identify which campaigns have contributed most to your account’s performance variation, from both a positive and negative perspective.”

    “Another key feature that differentiates the Bing Ads Top Movers report from other search providers is the ease of access to the Opportunities tab—which allows the user to explore keyword, bid, budget and other factors that can drive an increase in clicks/spend for the related ‘top decrease’ movers,” says Li.

    You can find the feature under the Dimensions tab in All Campaigns view. It’s available to all advertisers in the United States. Read this post from Li to learn more about how to use it.

    You can also expect more functionality to come to the Top Movers report. Bing says it will soon deliver a more granular level of detail for identifying elements of campaigns and ad groups that have the biggest changes.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Follows Google Into Conversational Search

    Microsoft’s search engine is once again following Google’s lead, adding new conversational search capabilities.

    You may recall, Google announced its version over a year ago, and has slowly made improvements to it in the meantime. In May, for example, the “Ok, Google” feature became available for all Chrome users in the U.S.

    Yan Ke, Principal Development Lead for the Bing Relevance Team says, “For all kinds of searches, Bing lets you ask a question the way you would ask a friend. For example, ‘who is the President of the United States’ or ‘the tallest building in the world’, or ‘who played Morpheus in The Matrix’, Bing will show the most pertinent information about Barack Obama, Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Lawrence Fishburne. So, by combining conversational understanding with our knowledge repository containing information on billions of people, places and things, you can dive and learn more about a topic or interest.”

    “Today we’re taking it a step further,” says Ke. “Now, not only will give you the answer directly in the search results, but we will also continue the conversation. For instance, you can ask ‘who is the president of the united states’, we will show you the answer. From there you might ask, “who is his wife” or “how tall is he.” Bing maintains the context and keeps the conversation moving forward.”

    The company didn’t say anything about saying, “OK, Bing.” They did say we can expect additional improvements in the coming days.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Twitter Axes Bing-Powered Translations

    Twitter Axes Bing-Powered Translations

    About a year ago, Twitter began offering instant tweet translations, powered by Bing. As with any basic translation tool, it wasn’t always the most accurate thing around, but it worked in many instances.

    And now it’s gone. There are tweets from people complaining about the lack of the Bing translate going as far back as August 2nd, so it appears that Twitter quietly phased out the feature.

    We confirmed, through searches for tweets in various languages, that the Bing translation feature is nowhere to be found on desktop or mobile.

    Going forward, it’s unlikely that Twitter would be content to exist without some sort of translation feature. Twitter is too global, and the way news and trends are spread across the social landscape pretty much demands some basic sort of translation. Maybe they removed Bing translate because they were unsatisfied with its performance (it had a tendency to do some weird things). Maybe they’re just making it better, and will relaunch it at some point.

    Or maybe Twitter is moving away from Bing as its translation source. Bing and Twitter have had a solid search partnership for nearly five years – one they continue to expand – so it’s not like Twitter and Bing are on the outs or anything.

  • The New Bing Ads Web Interface Has Launched

    Last week, Microsoft announced its new redesign of the Bing Ads web interface. It’s now launched, and will roll out to advertisers over the next few weeks.

    With the new version, Microsoft touts easier access to frequently used tools and links, shard libraries (lists of entities you can reuse across campaigns), multi-metric trend charts, better proposals in the Opportunities tab, and an overhauled Change History page with undo functionality.

    You can get a basic rundown of all this stuff here.

    “This is just the beginning — we will certainly have more updates to share in the future as we continue to listen to your feedback, improve usability, offer more controls and insights, and further improve our navigational experience so it feels like a home for you, our advertisers,” the company says in a blog post.

    The roll-out starts today with a small group, and will continue throughout the course of August. Even as it rolls out, some of the new features might not be available right away.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Google Reportedly Reveals ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Stats

    EU regulators had that meeting with the search engines about the “right to be forgotten” ordeal on Thursday, and Google did indeed participate. There had initially been some question regarding whether or not Google would be in attendance.

    The Wall Street Journal has a source apparently with direct knowledge of what was discussed in the meeting, and shares some stats Google presented, which include:

    – It has removed over 50% of URLs requested.

    – It has rejected over 30%.

    – It has requested additional info for 15% of cases.

    – It has received requests from 91,000 people to remove 328,000 URLs just through 07/18.

    – 17,500 requests came from France, while 16,500 came from Germany, and 12,000 came from the UK.

    There’s no word on what kind of numbers Bing is seeing, though its tool has only been available since last week.

    Yahoo was reportedly also in attendance at the meeting, but it’s still unclear what the company’s status is in relation to the law.

    Image via Google

  • Microsoft Adds Online Insertion Orders To Bing Ads

    Microsoft announced that Bing Ads users can now create and manage insertion orders online through Bing Ads or the Bing Ads API. Included is a new workflow aimed at simplifying the billing process, and making it less time-consuming.

    Users can create simply sign into Bing Ads, and create or approve IOs within the Accounts & Billing section. When an IO is accepted, the user gets an email, and it will be effective on the start date. They can be created 24/7, and approved and tracked online.

    Bing Ads will send notifications when there are important changes to the IO, such as if one is created or accepted, or one is created by an account manager, and needs your review. It also lets you create overlapping IOs to avoid gaps in ad campaigns.

    All previous IOs are also listed in the Insertion Orders section under Accounts & Billing. From there, you can click “Create Order” to get a creation form. There’s also an option to cancel orders.

    More here.

    Image via Bing

  • Yahoo’s Search Market Share Reportedly Lowest It’s Ever Been

    comScore should be releasing its latest U.S. search market numbers soon, but as Greg Sterling reports, some analysts got them early, and have been talking about them. Yahoo has reportedly fallen below 10% market share, which is the lowest it’s ever been.

    According to Sterling’s report, the numbers shake out like this: Google (67.6%), Bing (19.2%), Yahoo (9.8%), Others (3.4%). That puts Yahoo/Bing at 29%, which is consistent with its previous market share, so that whole Search Alliance thing doesn’t seem to be helping Yahoo too much. No wonder Marissa Mayer hates it.

    Yahoo released its earnings report earlier this week. It began with a quote from Mayer about how unsatisfactory the results were. This included a 4% decline in revenue.

    “Our top priority is revenue growth and by that measure, we are not satisfied with our Q2 results,” she said. “While several areas showed strength, their growth was offset by declines.”

    Interestingly enough, Yahoo actually had a good quarter for search, which grew 6% year-over-year in terms of revenue. It grew 19% year-over-year in terms of search click-driven revenue.

    A report released by eMarketer this week projects that Microsoft will overtake Yahoo in online ads this year.

    Image via Yahoo

  • Bing Joins The ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Party

    Google has had its “right to be forgotten” request form up and running since late May. Bing has now finally followed suit with its version.

    If you haven’t been following along with the “right to be forgotten” storyline, I suggest you catch up here. It’s just too much to keep rehashing for every related article.

    Bing’s tool consists of a four-part process. Users must enter their identity, residence and contact info, state their role in society or their community, request the specific pages they want blocked, and of course the signature.

    “We encourage you to provide complete and relevant information for each applicable question on this form,” Bing tells users on the page. “We will use the information that you provide to evaluate your request. We may also consider other sources of information beyond this form to verify or supplement the information you provide. This information will help us to consider the balance between your individual privacy interest and the public interest in protecting free expression and the free availability of information, consistent with European law. As a result, making a request does not guarantee that a particular search result will be blocked.”

    It continues, “Note regarding minor children: If you are a minor, you may submit this form on your own. If you are a parent or legal guardian of a minor, you may submit this form on that minor’s behalf, in which case, all references to ‘you’ or ‘your’ will refer to the minor child.”

    “Given the many questions that have been raised about how the recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union should be implemented, this form and the related processes may change as additional guidance becomes available,” it concludes before getting into the form itself. “Submissions may be reevaluated over time.”

    The EU has called upon the search engines to have a meeting next week, and Bing has already confirmed that it will be in attendance. While Google and Yahoo have indicated they’ll cooperate with the EU on the matter, they didn’t immediately confirm attendance at the specific meeting.

    Yahoo has yet to introduce a tool of its own.

    Image via Bing

  • EU To Hold Meeting On ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Next Week

    It doesn’t seem like the whole mess that is the “right to be forgotten” is going to be thoroughly sorted out anytime soon, as regulators in Europe are now taking issue with Google’s implementation of the rules it is being forced to adopt.

    The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the EU privacy officials have called a meeting for next Thursday in Brussels with the major search engines to discuss things further. According to the report, Microsoft has confirmed that it will attend, while Google and Yahoo have said they’ll cooperate with officials, but haven’t confirmed attendance for the specific meeting.

    Regulators in Germany, it says, are concerned that Google isn’t removing search results from Google.com in the same way that it is with its EU-specific sites. Likewise, the director of a French watchdog says this puts the effectiveness of the whole thing into question.

    You don’t say.

    Other areas of concern include: cases that end up having the opposite effect of the right to be forgotten, as stories are written about their very involvement with this whole larger story; and the nature in which Google is notifying publishers when they’re content is being hidden in search results.

    It will be surprising if Google doesn’t end up attending the meeting, as it is obviously effected greatly by this whole thing, and the whole world is watching. It’s no surprise that Microsoft has confirmed its attendance, as it has been talking about implementing its version of the “right to be forgotten” feature on Bing in recent weeks, but has admitted it’s been a difficult process. In fact, some have criticized Google for complying so quickly while Bing is taking its time. Yahoo is said to be readying its own version as well, but we haven’t heard much from them on the matter.

    It will be interesting to see what kind of progress is made next week, if any.

    Image via Google

  • Bing Ads UI Now Lets You View Up To 100,000 Keywords

    Microsoft announced that the Bing Ads web user interface will now let you view up to 100,000 keywords. The company upgraded the interface earlier this year enabling advertisers to review accounts with up to 50,000 keywords in the Keyword tab. That’s now been doubled.

    They’ve also configured the ad groups and ads tabs to support more data.

    “The Bing Ads team is continuing to scale the UI to much larger accounts and have started piloting accounts up to 250,000 keywords,” notes Bing Ads principal program manager lead Sachin Tayade. “Accounts having more keywords than these limits will continue to be manageable in the UI by simply narrowing the scope to a specific campaign.”

    “We expect this will improve your experience in the Bing Ads UI, and look forward to your continued feedback on these features,” he adds.

    Earlier this week, Bing discussed how it battles “bad ads” in a blog post that describes its process.

    Image via Bing

  • Bing Adds New Twitter Search Features

    Bing Adds New Twitter Search Features

    Bing announced on Friday that it is rolling out a feature that lets you search for specific Twitter profiles or hashtags. If you just do a hashtag search, it will give you results for recent tweets for it like so:

    If you start your search with an “@,” it will recognize that you’re looking for a Twitter handle:

    It will also show tweets from other people related to that person’s Twitter handle.

    Bing is also including celebrity gossip from Twitter in regular celebrity searches. If you search for Ashton Kutcher, for example, it may include tweets from accounts like Us Weekly and and E! News.

    Bing and Twitter renewed their search deal in November, which continues to give Bing Twitter access unavailable to Google.

    Images via Bing