In the fourth quarter of 2014, Yahoo/Bing saw its highest paid search market share since the Search Alliance was formed back in 2008: Yahoo/Bing now has a 26% market share, compared with Google’s 74%.
If you’re not on the Bing Ads bandwagon yet, it’s time to get busy. I believe Bing Ads will eventually overtake Google Adwords in ad market share. Here’s why.
Ad Innovation
Bing Ads is no longer the red-headed stepchild of PPC. They’ve caught up with Google in terms of feature parity, and they offer more flexibility for advertisers than Google. Tablet bid modifiers, a choice of local or toll free phone numbers in call extensions, a Skype logo on call extensions, and ad annotations are just some of the features Bing offers that Google does not.
All of these elements help ads stand out on the Bing search engine results page, leading to a higher click-through rate. Since Bing visitors tend to convert better than Google visitors, higher CTRs are a boon for advertisers looking to attract more of those high-converting visitors to their website.
Customer Service
No one would argue that Google’s revolving door of salespeople reps provides better service than the Bing Ads team. Bing Ads is active on Twitter, participating in PPC Chat and responding to advertiser questions. While Google has gotten better about this recently, they’re way behind Bing.
And Bing assigns actual reps to accounts. We’ve had the same Bing Ads account team for years. They’re proactive and helpful, and they understand our clients. Contrast this with Google, whose “account teams” change every quarter, and recommendations consist of “add ad extensions and increase your CPC.”
Let’s face it: even the most knowledgeable PPC pros run into issues now and then, or have questions they can’t answer. Having a reliable team of reps that know your clients encourages us to spend more.
Firefox
In November, Firefox changed their default search engine from Google to Yahoo. Yahoo’s market share promptly increased from 6% to 9%, while Google’s dropped from 71% to 66%. Now, 9% doesn’t sound like a huge share – and it’s not. But that’s a 50% increase in share for Yahoo.
Remember, Yahoo is part of the Bing Ads network, so by advertising with Bing, you’re advertising on Yahoo as well. And you’ll reach those Firefox users who used to see Google results but are now seeing Yahoo results. Let’s face it: a lot of users don’t know how to change their default search engine, even when prompted.
Voice and Gesture Search
Voice search isn’t new. Many of us are accustomed to saying “OK Google” to our phones and asking a question, or using Siri on an iPhone. But Bing’s Cortana takes things to the next level.
Cortana can understand user intent and maintain a conversational state with the user. You can ask Cortana sequential questions, like “Will I need a jacket today?” and then “What about tomorrow?” and it understands that you’re still talking about the weather. Cortana also learns your preferences and tailors searches to them in a much more personal way than Google personalized search.
Bing also understands gestures on enabled devices like the Xbox and newer PCs. Whoever thought we’d be able to wave at our TV to turn it on? Or physically reach out and virtually grab an icon on a TV screen to select it, and swipe your hand to scroll? It’s here, folks – and Google isn’t doing any of this stuff yet.
Voice search is already revolutionizing PPC search queries. Gestured searching, currently in its infancy, could change the game entirely.
Google Arrogance
There was a time when it seemed everything Google touched turned to gold. Those days are long gone. Witness Google Glass: the much-maligned wearable technology. It was all the rage, and yet Google killed it off recently. Google clearly thought this was a great product, yet it didn’t last.
Google Adwords suffers from the same arrogance. Many features rolled out in the past year have been good for Google, but not necessarily good for advertisers: forced close variants, dynamic sitelinks, desktop traffic combined with tablet traffic, etc.
You may be thinking, “Bing has those things too.” But Bing added them after Google rolled them out, to keep parity with Google. I’m not convinced that Bing would have made these changes if Google didn’t make them first.
It’s time for a new king of the search hill, and Bing is poised for the job.
Melissa Mackey
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Greg says
Great article. I started to use Bing Ads recently and I am going to the Bing Ads meetup in Boston next week.
I completely agree with the customer service. I can get to Bing and get my questions answered before I get someone from Google to help
MJ DePalma says
We can’t wait to meet you Greg! Looking forward to helping you with any questions about Bing Ads and learning about your business. See you in Boston!
Jeremy Templer says
Interesting, and some of your points ring true, except that in terms of changes in ad policies (and those that benefit Google more than advertisers), Bing has a habit of following suit.
I also don’t think that Bing would find the current level of service to be scaleable should they overtake Google…and we know how that story ends.
Finally, you are looking at US market share only and Bing has considerably less market share in other countries. I believe Bing has around 4%-6% market share here in New Zealand, and we’re not unique in that regard. So I guess that your use of “eventually” to describe when this might happen could encompass quite different time spans in different countries.
What would make people switch? I suspect there are a lot of people who worry that Google has too much control over their personal information, and might switch to a different search engine if the experience of using that search engine was markedly better than using Google. Ironically, though, I think that it is what Google knows about us (what our recent searches were when using Google’s Chrome browser across different devices, where we live and work, how long it takes us to get to work and so on) that helps deliver great search results.
So I think it unlikely that people will switch from Google to Microsoft if privacy is their concern. But should Bing steal significant advantage in an area like mobile search (where voice will become more commonly used than typed input, and where location is often contextually important to the search) there’s a chance. And where searchers go, advertisers will follow, of course. Eventually…
Yatin Mulay says
Melissa, some absolutely valid points there *but* I’m not sure Bing Ads will eventually overtake Adwords in near future if ever! The main reasons being:
a) Bing ads doesn’t really have any meaningful presence outside USA whereas Google has a much well entrenched presence across the world with ad support infrastructure in place. (It’s a nightmare experience for agencies & advertisers to even get started with Bing Ads if they’re located outside USA)
b) Bing has relatively weaker assets where the media spends are headed viz: Mobile & Video. I was just reading CISCO’s whitepaper about mobile data trends and according to it, by 2019, 73% of mobile content will be video. While Google has Youtube, Android & Google Now, Bing doesn’t have comparable assets of their own.
The only scenario I can see Bing ads being a formidable competitor to adwords if they can strike ad partnership deals with : Facebook / Twitter / Amazon / Pinterest; but given the fact that Bing Ads is not a core product for Microsoft, I’m not sure how aggressively they’ll pursue exploring this synergy.
James says
Now if only they released that Mac editor…
Mark says
“the red-headed stepchild of PPC”
Wow.
nauman says
Adwords CPCs are pathetically high while its Quality Scores mechanism has inherent flaws. Its really arrogant.
You’ve missed a point here: Bing is acquiring smartphone apps and launching its apps for android/ios which will give further boost to Bing/Yahoo in the long run.
Bob Vila says
There’s a reason Bing can provide better service…they don’t have nearly as many clients as Google has.
Also, as an advertiser, Bing has a lot of cleanup to do before it can even begin to compete with Google.
My company lost $180,000 in one day because Bing thought an automated query of symbols (*&%$!@) triggered one of our keywords. That’s never happened with Google before.
Alex says
“Innovation”
LOL
They just copy everything that AdWords does.
John says
Did you even read the Glass article you posted or just the headline? They shut down the Explorer program and are focusing on the enterprise side of the business where the technology makes more sense to be used. Here’s more info in article that came out yesterday: http://www.cio.com/article/2879048/google-glass/google-glass-is-alive-and-well-in-the-enterprise.html
They tested the product in the consumer market, saw that it wasn’t a success in that regard, and shifted their focus. I’m not sure how any of that is arrogant behavior.
As far as Bing overtaking Adwords, that would require people to actually want to use Bing as a search engine. That’s just simply not going to happen, especially from a global perspective. The only reason they gained market share in the US is because Firefox made them the default engine. As people start to switch back, the numbers will likely go back to where they were.
In my years of advertising with both Bing and AdWords, Bing has always been lightyears behind in functionality and quality. The web interface is a nightmare and there’s no application for Macs. While results were decent, it has never been scalable.
This whole article just feels like click bait to me so for that, you’ve succeeded.