Bing brings results to advertisers

Microsoft launched Bing, a new search engine, last June. The company is heavily promoting the new system to make it a formidable competitor against Google, the undisputed search engine king. Bing generates revenue mainly from pay-per-click advertising, which are often used by small scale e-commerce firms.

Practical ecommerce, the e-commerce online business journal, recently sat down with The Search Agency, a pay-per-click management firm, to talk about Bing’s pay-per-click advertising. The Search Agency has several clients who advertise on Bing.

“We manage over 100 million keywords on behalf of our clients across all the major search engines,” said Frank Lee, senior vice president of client service at The Search Agency. “We have about 50 clients we partner with for paid search. Each client spends anywhere from 3 percent to 10 percent of its budget on Microsoft.”

And Lee asserts that money spent on Bing is, indeed, money well spent.

“Campaigns have always performed well on Microsoft from an efficiency standpoint,” explains Lee. “We’ve always seen good CPAs (cost per acquisitions) or return on investment in managing accounts in adCenter. However, we’ve seen low volume of conversions or sales historically.”

Lee says that Bing has led to improvements in conversion, sales volume, and efficiency metrics.

He continues, “In fact, we conducted an analysis of a cross-section of accounts, comparing their performance for the last three weeks of Live Search to their first three weeks with Bing.”

The final statistics indicate a 15 percent growth in click through rate, a 6 percent increase in conversions, a 18 percent increase in conversion rate-up, and lastly a 3 percent reduction in cost per acquisition.

Lee explains: “Although Bing’s search volume has increased on the heels of its aggressive marketing campaign, Microsoft has been more selective on which ads it serves on each search results page, often times electing not to serve any ads at all. As a result, we saw a 22 percent drop in total impressions. But Bing has significantly increased the relevancy of those impressions, yielding double-digit growth in CTRs and conversion rates.”

Source: Practical ecommerce