Microsoft announced that it is making some changes to the way incremental bids work in BIng Ads. According to the company, the changes will give advertisers more options to control how bidding on keywords works to maximize return-on-investment, as well as ensure the accuracy of info from imported AdWords campaigns.
“An item of note is that today, bid adjustments are ignored when importing campaigns from Google AdWords,” says Bing Ads program manager Dare Obasanjo. “The key reason for this is that there is a significant discrepancy between how bid adjustments are supported in Google AdWords and how they are supported in Bing Ads. As part of our upcoming changes, we plan to support the importation of bid adjustments from Google AdWords.”
This year, Microsoft says it will begin supporting the ability to specify a negative bid adjustment for various criteria, and will add support for adding bid adjustments for device targets.
“This means as an advertiser you can either increase or decrease your bid if the searcher is on a desktop/laptop, tablet or smartphone,” explains Obasanjo. “Given the different conversion rates one sees on mobile devices versus desktops and laptops, we believe providing this option will give advertisers a powerful tool to maximize their return on investment.”
To allow these changes, Microsoft has to update its range of supported bid adjustments, so device bid adjustments will range from -90% to +300%, while all other bid adjustments will range from -90% to +900%.
Finally, Microsoft will be adjusting bid adjustments so they’re combined as multiplicative percentages, as opposed to being added together.
“Today when a target user matches against multiple bid adjustment in Bing Ads these adjustments are added together,” explains Obasanjo. “We’ve received some feedback that the practice of adding together bid adjustments doesn’t align with industry practices or advertiser expectations in this space. This becomes especially problematic as we plan introduce negative bid adjustments to the system.”
Changes will begin to roll out at the end of the month, and should be generally available by the the end of the third quarter of the year.