How would you feel if someone searched for “health insurance” or “payday loans” and Bing showed a nice box for your company, essentially a free ad for your brand? Bing is doing just that for multiple high value search queries.
Here is an example for “payday loans”, a very competitive search query. Along with the usual organic search results and Bing Ads, they also include a “See results for” box, which is for all intents and purposes a free ad with a logo, brand name and description.
It is worth noting that neither of these companies were listed at the top of the Bing search results… in fact, neither were even listed on the first page of the search results at all.
Which also raises the question of why is Bing selecting the particular companies to showcase that they are. Is it advertising spend? One of the companies is a Bing Ads advertiser. With those brands not ranking for the search term in this example, it would seem organic rankings have nothing to do with it either. So it isn’t exactly clear why Bing is selecting the brands they are to showcase in these boxes.
They are also using a second version where they are bringing up a branded knowledge panel for a company, again for a highly competitive generic keyword search – and a company that doesn’t even have either of the search terms in the name.
This example for the same search query that gives Check Into Cash a huge promotion in the search results with one of these knowledge panels that appears right at the top of the search results, and above the Bing Ads too.
The description for the box is taken from the company’s knowledge panel.
When you click on one of the two free branded box results, it takes you to a search result page for the brand.
When you click on the second option, it also displays ads above the organic result, so Bing is actually getting a double opportunity for ad revenue by leading to an additional search, rather than directly to the site. And I suspect Check Into Cash wasn’t anticipating search traffic in this way when they decided to place a Bing Ad for their brand name.
Here are some more examples of unbranded generic search queries where Bing suggests brands.
These panels for companies showing up for generic keyword searches would be worth a significant amount in advertising, if they were a sponsored ad listing. Could it be something they are testing for a Bing Ads ad unit, but using these brands to test click throughs on these cards?
While it is unclear what is triggering these boxes or why the particular companies are being selected to showcase, it is a pretty sweet deal for any company to have their brand featured in one of these boxes for free.
Jennifer Slegg
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