Bing revs up PPC advertising campaign

In a study last month, eCommerce conducted a survey about Bing—Microsoft’s search engine—as a platform for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Around 66% of the respondents said that they would use Bing for PPC advertising and 25% said that they would consider using it.

Over 90% of the respondents said that they were either using Bing, planned to use Bing, and would consider using it for PPC campaigns. Some companies, who don’t use PPC ads, even said that they would consider using the new search engine.

As of late, Bing has been attracting a lot of PPC opportunities. Microsoft has surrounded the search engine with an extensive PPC campaign that is really paying off. PPC professionals have reported better conversion rates, and comScore, a trend tracking firm, said that Bing had boosted Microsoft’s search share.

Majority of the respondents said that Bing is healthy competition for Google. Over 86 percent said that Google needs a stronger competitor in the PPC advertising market and 22 percent said that Google is monopolizing the market. And Microsoft is heavily marketing Bing to make it a stronger competitor against Google, the search engine giant.

In a recent article from Advertising Age, it said that Microsoft is planning to shell out $80 million in Bing advertising for 2009 alone. This expensive promotional campaign will help and has helped attract hoards of web searchers to the site.

“These initial data suggest that Microsoft Bing has generated early interest, resulting in a spike in search engagement and an immediate term improvement to Microsoft’s position in the search market,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president, in June 2009.

He continued: “So far, it appears that the lifts in searcher penetration and engagement have held relatively steady throughout the five-day period. The ultimate performance of Bing depends on the extent to which it generates more trial through its extensive launch campaign and whether it retains those trial users. It appears it is off to a good start.”

Source: practical ecommerce