What’s New with Bing Search in 2018
February 12, 2018
Google is the most well-known search engine giant in the Western world, but that doesn’t mean that other search engine companies, like Bing, haven’t been making headlines this year. Created and operated by Microsoft, Bing is the outcome of many other search engine tries such as Live search and MSN search. It was first unveiled in 2009, and has been a competitor of Google since its arrival.
As of 2012, following a deal struck in 2009, Bing partnered with Yahoo, supplying a majority of results for Yahoo searches as well. In 2015 Bing was announced to be in second place of the search engine race, directly behind Google.
So, what has the number two search engine in the world been up to this year? Here’s a look at some of the changes and news Bing has created since the new year.
Labels for DSA Personalization
DSA’s or Dynamic Search Ads, was introduced to the marketing public in October of last year, and focused on streamlining relevant ads to target audiences via Bing’s algorithm for crawling. The algorithm seeks organic content and pairs it to search queries based on previous searches and keywords. This is a particularly useful tool for advertisers, because it saves them the efforts of researching and designating keywords for their ads. Instead, ads are shown to online consumers based on the crawling algorithm.
As of February 15th, Bing has introduced Labels, a way to automatically filter and organize DSA’s through the Bings Ad Editor. Labels can be shared between two ads, or used for singular ads, each is color coded for easy finding and usage. This allows users to pause or activate special offers and promotions easily. For example, if there is an ad rolling out for a limited time, or several ads which are targeted toward a time-sensitive promotion, userscan label these ads “Promotions” or “Special Offer”. When it comes time to remove or pause these ads as the promotion comes to an end, rather than look for each individual offer manually, Bing advertisers can search by the label “Promotions” and find all the ads they targeted for this purpose quickly and efficiently.
Prince Bajracharya, the Program Manager at Microsoft/Bing explained the changes, and provided photos of the Labels tool in action on the Bingads website as the launch took place. Here, users can gain a better understanding of what the Labels tool looks like and how the color coding works to benefit advertisers.
Bing Allows Advertisers to Check Performance
Another change this year to the Bing ads platform comes in the form of a method for advertisers to check their performance. The tool is called Audience Segmentation, and offers a detailed report on how your target audience vs. non-targeted users are seeing and evaluating your content.
Audience Segmentation was designed and launched in the hopes of streamlining performance checks for advertisers. It is marketed by Bing as taking no more than a minute to use, and export. This is an addition to the Segmentation feature, which was put in place in March of 2016 to navigate report data without leaving your campaign page. The Audience addition restructures this initial launch, creating a method of reviewing the same data in a more compact way. In the past, users would have to manually combine the data from Ad group and Audience reports to see how a product or ad was fairing with the public. Now, this can automatically be reported at the press of a button.
This tool works for those seeking answers on how well a new ad or product is doing within paid search audiences and in-market audiences. You can launch a new campaign, and follow up within weeks by clicking the Audience Segmentation tool. This will show whether the campaign is a success, and by how much, allowing you to restructure as necessary.
Audience Segmentation isn’t all about bulk, you can still view each category of consumer through the feature by splitting information by audience name or category. You can view by an ad group and then see each individual category within that group. For example, the group could be for a new shampoo you’re selling, and the categories could be “visitors to site”, “abandoned carts”, “shampoo purchases”, etc.
This newest feature is available on Account Summer, Ad Groups, Keywords, Ads, Campaigns, and Ad Extensions tabs. Data available for the Audience Segmentation feature begins as of January 2018, continuing onward throughout the year, making it a useful tool for new marketing strategies of 2018. Data from the tool is downloadable for offline usage as well, making it easy to take on the go.
Bing has said their reasons for launching the tool, other than convenience and accessibility for users, are to help expand target audiences, allow for review of ill-performing marketing, and allow for bid boosting on strong performing ads.
Bing updates their personal news regularly through the Bing ads blog. Here, advertisers and website owners can learn more about upcoming changes and read more in-depth reviews of what Bing has in store for this year. On May 2, 2018, Bing is holding their Global Bing Partner Awards at the Fremont Studios, Seattle, WA. Select partners and elite Bing officials will be in attendance, where awards will be given to honor innovative and impacting work from Bing ads partners around the globe. We can only assume that Bing will have more details on launches for the upcoming year being announced at the ceremony.