Bing Ads: what’s the best bidding strategy for B2B?

Originally posted in r/PPC on reddit, somehow hijacked halfway through.

Question

Answer (+ follow-ups)

I’d stick with enhanced CPC.

Bing is really good for some niches, there are clearly industries where it’s failing and you shouldn’t expect much from it.

Thanks for getting back to me! Looking at our competitors they do seem to be quite acting in Bing, our main issue is the high cost per lead in the platform unfortunately.

I see! 

Well, there are three things I can think of, and it’s just going to sound generic but that’s usually how it is if you think your setup is good: 

• they are profitable because they have a combination of reputation/better offer/better landing page/more expensive;
• they are not that profitable but they are recouping the cost on lifetime value (idk about your business sorry, just assuming there’s some repeat value);
• the CPC has increased for everyone on Bing and Google over the past few years, if you got priced out because of that, you need to think of how to get competitive again unfortunately.

It’s unlikely but I can think of a few things:

• they could be trying to get their competitors out by bidding aggressively;
• it’s the end of FY2023/24 for some companies (end of June) and they have excess budget;
• it’s the beginning of FY2024/25 (beginning of March) for some others and they are under heavy pressure to grow.

Is your business impacted by seasonality? That could be an issue too.

Other thing I should have talked about earlier. Since I wrote that, Bing has started serving across a LOT of absolutely garbage inventory.

This was getting unmanageable for me on some accounts so I had to tone it down a lot.

Make sure you run a sanity check on the Publisher URL report.

Yeah, I unfortunately feel your pain.

I went Exact on every account on Bing, save for two campaigns which are working with Phrase somehow and these are the only two campaigns using smart bidding… and even then, Exact has been serving a lot of garbage. Uncontrollable, but CPAs have been decent.

I’m unable to get phrase and smart bidding working on any of the other accounts I look after, which is really frustrating.

If you think your structure is clean and the publisher URLs are looked after, then there’s not much else to look after on the platform (except CPCs).

Some further tips you may have already applied since you seem to have been looking after your account well:

• Consider treating Bing differently from Google if you haven’t already — as in, don’t simply Import changes from Google, but take care of Bing as a separate entity. What works on Google doesn’t necessarily work on Bing (and vice-versa).
• This may be controversial, but adopt as many Bing features as you can, such as multimedia ads, image extensions, etc.
  • I looked after a tier 1 account on Bing. Adopting features early always seemed to allow us to display on more inventory, even if it had nothing to do with the feature itself. I barely get 500 impressions a month on image extensions, but somehow when turning it off (or not setting it up), I get fewer impressions overall.
• Set up remarketing on Bing. It can work, I have accounts where remarketing outperforms the same campaigns on Google.
• Consider campaigns targeting higher in the funnel on Bing. This hasn’t always worked, but when it did it delivered really cheap leads due to lack of competition.

Finally, you know the bread & butter: improve ad copies, landing pages and offer… and maybe burn a candle or two for the algo to do something.

Many thanks, I appreciate your help!

You’re very welcome! Good luck and keep me updated if you will. 🙂

Amazing tips! i really appreciate it 🙂 Will update you.