I’m writing this post because there’s a real lack of awareness about Bing Advertising.

There are good reasons why you may not have considered advertising on Bing so far. After all, Google corners some 90% of the search engine market and Bing advertising only covers about 6% (if you allow for the fact their advertising also covers Yahoo!). So Bing often gets ignored because it just doesn’t have access to the same audience.

As a result, it’s massively under-used. And when a platform like this is massively under-used it means one thing – advertising can be much cheaper. For one client I’m dealing with, that means an average 25p click across a campaign in Google Adwords is costing just 13p per click on average on Bing. In short, the ad campaign on Bing goes almost twice as far as the campaign on Google Adwords.

If what you’re selling captures relatively few searches, then it’s probably not worth your while. But there are many instances in which advertising with Bing could bring significant benefits, both in terms of lowered ad spend, decreased click costs and increased visibility for your marketing budget:

• Lots of people are searching for products like yours
• You’re currently bidding for highly competitive, therefore high cost, search terms
• You sell nationally or internationally

Any of the factors above might mean it’s worth a look and a little bit of experimental spending. Large companies with plenty of resources have cottoned on to this. But there are many more companies out there who need to make marketing budgets stretch much further, whilst still reaching the target audience in a competitive way.

Is The Quality of the Audience Different?

The audiences of each search engine differ a little. Bing and Yahoo! seem to favour somewhat older users. Google seems to attract a slightly larger percentage of high income owners. And Yahoo! seems to have a slightly greater share of lower income searchers.

But to be perfectly honest, I think keyword targeting defines the quality of the audience you get more significantly than these overall trends. Keyword exclusions also do a lot to filter out tyre kickers. So if you have your campaign set up well, then I don’t think it’s going to make much difference.

Using Bing Advertising

If you think there’s even a sniff of an opportunity in Bing and you’re working within a saturated keyword niche with high click costs, Bing is certainly worth a couple of months’ experimentation. Clearly some keyword niches will still be competitive and attract higher click costs. But I think that fewer agencies out there deal with Bing, so fewer people are highlighting it as a potential opportunity.

I’d say if you’re spending more than £1000 per month on Google Adwords, then it may be worth bolstering your efforts by accessing Bing’s audience too.