Drive and Convert (Ep. 101): Is Microsoft Ads Worth Your Time?

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About This Episode:

Jon and Ryan provide valuable insights into the world of Microsoft Ads. The discussion kicks off with an exploration of recent developments at Microsoft, including the company’s rebranding of Bing Ads as Microsoft Ads and its strategic investments in AI.

They also delve into the potential and opportunities for advertising on Bing, shedding light on the unique advantages of the platform, such as lower competition and potential arbitrage opportunities.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why companies should consider leveraging Microsoft Ads
2. What are some key differences between Microsoft Ads and Google
3. What strategies to use when running campaigns in Microsoft Ads 
4. How Microsoft Ads differentiates itself from other platforms 
5. Which other platforms to consider outside of Google and Microsoft Ads

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Ryan, a couple of things have happened recently that have brought up today’s topic and you thought it’d be a great topic to have a conversation about because of these. So first of all, Microsoft recently, if only briefly even, I’m not sure if they are today, but the market’s been all over the place, which is in a good way actually, but Microsoft recently had become the world’s most valuable company, which was interesting to see. They had been previously, I believe, and then they were again, based on market cap. And then also, you were telling me how Microsoft recently came to town to meet with the logical position team and they really were doubling down on the partnership you have there. So it made sense to get an update about what’s going on. I know my team here at The Good, we see analytics all the time and overall traffic from Bing, organic or even ads has just honestly generally been pretty low.
Now maybe there’s some change there I’m not aware of that makes the ads on Bing worth the time and energy. I’d love to get your perspective on that and hear about maybe what’s coming down the line there. But it really has also on the positive side, been a big arbitrage opportunity because not a lot of brands are on there. So in that sense, you could buy ads a lot cheaper than Google or other competitors because you were able to own the keyword because no one else was on there. So for certain demographics, it made a lot of sense.

Ryan:
And at the end of the day, I think Microsoft is just an interesting beast because when you think Microsoft, you don’t think Bing. I mean, most people, I don’t know if they put those together, but Microsoft’s really trying to rebrand Bing Ads at least as Microsoft Ads, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get there, but as they make all these investments in AI through ChatGPT, which is probably the driver of their stock price, as it seems to be for everybody. If you don’t have AI in your business, I don’t know how you have a stock right now based on what’s going on. I even think Logical Position is trying to figure out how do we tell people we have automation slash AI?

Jon:
Yeah, there you go.

Ryan:
You’ve got to at least talk about it so that people can get interested. But when doing the research for this topic over the last couple of days, Bing’s search volume globally is actually picking up pretty rapidly, pulling in numbers. Like since September ’23, so just about four months globally, Bing search volume has increased 14%, or their market share versus all the other search engines out there, which is essentially Google. And 14% up in four months? I mean, most businesses would be extremely happy with that. It still isn’t very close to Google globally, but fractions of percentages are still billions of searches, so there is a lot of volume there and there’s a lot of opportunity I think for brands, depending on where you’re at with other advertising channels, probably.

Jon:
I think you’re right, who wouldn’t be happy with up 14% in the last five months? That’s not bad growth. But what are we talking here as a percentage of Google? 25% of Google, 10%? Where do you think that lies?

Ryan:
I think Microsoft would be ecstatic with those numbers. At the end of the day. Globally, Microsoft has, and Bing has about 3.4% of search volume compared with Google that’s 91%, a little over that. I think Google in the last decade has gone below 90% one time for search volume. But I will say in the US, Microsoft does have a larger share than they do globally, which if you’re selling e-commerce, and you’re listening to our podcast at least, you’re probably selling in the US. They have a much larger share at 7.8, almost 7.9% of US search volume, and that’s actually up 24% in the same timeframe. So they’re growing much faster in the US as far as click share and search volume of people looking for information online. Not quite 10% of Google, but it’s getting closer quickly, and there’s probably various reasons we can go into the underlying data around that.
I don’t have the specific numbers of where all that search is coming from or why it’s all coming to Bing, if there’s new partnerships, new relationships that I don’t know about yet potentially. There’s a lot of cool things on Bing, things even my parents don’t use when they go to Bing. I actually went and created, I needed some images and I couldn’t find one that really did what I wanted it to do for a presentation or a project I was doing, and I went and there’s a button that says, “Do you want to make an image with AI?” I was like, “Yes, I do.” And made it very easy, despite me having absolutely zero talent when it comes to graphic design or creative. So I think some of the stuff they’re getting and some of the search volume could be related just to the cool factor or the interesting factor rather than, “Hey, I’m searching for product X, please show me Bing.”

Jon:
Well, they’ve done a good job, if I understand it, of integrating that AI that they have into their search. And the industry buzz I’ve heard, now you’re obviously way closer to this than I am, but the industry buzz I’ve heard over the past year or so has been, that’s where Microsoft thinks it’s going to win in search, is having this large open AI background of AI baked into their search, if you will.

Ryan:
And I think they’re really good at marketing. That is what I would boil it down to. Google’s had AI or systems in the background doing a lot of the same stuff for years. I just think that Google happens to be very far behind the curve when it comes to telling people they have AI. They have this system within their ads called BART, and I think their marketing team needs to be better about naming things. If you’re coming up with the word, it’s probably an acronym for something, but if nothing else, the Bing team is doing very good at letting people know that they have AI and that you should come use Bing because of all this wonderful AI. Good job on their part, I think.

Jon:
Yeah. Okay. Knowing all of this background then, what are you currently recommending to companies regarding ads on Bing?

Ryan:
I think the simple answer is you just need to be there. If people are searching for stuff on Bing, why would you not be there? I mean, you can set up a Bing Ads account or Microsoft Ads account for free and then run ads. It’s not complicated. I think the last stat I heard was that 50% or less of companies spending money on Google have a Bing account.

Jon:
So then that arbitrage opportunity is still there.

Ryan:
It’s for sure there, but I do think that Bing is, similar to what Google’s doing, they’re putting some minimum click costs in place. They know that there’s value, so I think one of the most expensive terms on Google is mesothelioma, and if that term was on Bing, I think Bing’s like, “Well, we’re not going to just give away things for free. If people are willing to spend $500 a click, let’s take it, even if there’s not 100 competitors.” So there’s no reason not to be there, especially if you have a Google account. I would say 100% of companies that have a Google Ads account should have a Bing account, because you don’t even have to do anything to set up your account.
Well, you have to set up the account on Bing, I’ll say that. So you have to be able to fill out a form that says, “Who are you? What’s your email address? Input your credit card.” You don’t have to build the account though. There’s a button that will come up to say, “Hey, do you have a Google account?” Yes, I do. “Do you want to import that into Bing Ads?” Yes, I do. Click. Your account’s built. Whatever you were doing on Google is now on Microsoft Ads and you can run ads now.

Jon:
I’m shocked to hear that Google allows that.

Ryan:
I mean, it’s all through AI, and so there’s AI connectors built in through the Google system, through Google Ads. So application of the APIs, it shouldn’t be difficult. I actually don’t think Google’s that worried about Bing. And so at the end of the day, they probably don’t care that much. And maybe if you spend money on Bing, you’ll still spend, I mean, I don’t think you’re ever moving money from Google to Bing. You’re just adding it on. And so if you’re spending 10,000 on Google, you can expect somewhere around 1,000 or 1,500 to spend on Bing. Ballparking it. So whatever you spend, figure 10 to 15% should be on Bing. It’s just simple. Bing doesn’t quite have 10% of Google’s share of search, so you get less than 10% of the volume from a search perspective. But if you’ve been to Bing recently and done a search, it is all ads and their text ads are, I mean, it’s probably not really fair, but it’s hard to tell that they’re an ad.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
I look at search results all day every day, and I was with our chief strategy officer, Brian, looking at some Bing search results the other day, and we were both confused on what an ad was. We missed the little ad thing that says this is an ad because Bing was so good at hiding that that was an ad. So there’s getting a lot of clicks on ads. So ads are important. So the punchline is be there, set your expectations correctly, but also it’s an unknown here. So I’m telling companies to set your budgets daily higher than you would expect to spend. So if you’ve got a $100 budget a day on Google and you’re not quite spending it, you might think, oh, I’ll set 10 to $15 a day on Microsoft Ads.
The problem is we’re seeing instances where an advertiser is for sure spending money on Microsoft Ads, but we will see instances of them not even showing up and being available in the shopping section of Microsoft or on bing.com, even in the “free” area. So we’re like, okay, what is going on there? Why are some companies just not showing? Current hypothesis as of recording this early February 2024, so I can timestamp this for later when I go back and say, “I’m wrong,” like we did on our hundredth episode.

Jon:
Episode 200.

Ryan:
To set your daily budget higher than you think you need to just to make sure that there’s not an algorithm on the backend saying, “Oh, you’re probably going to run out of budget if we put your ads up here.” So just be aware, setting up a little higher than you might expect.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Driving Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Yeah, so knowing that, does the strategy change at all on Bing versus Google?

Ryan:
I mean, the account structure being sucked in generally says, “Hey, there’s going to be text ads. There’s going to be shopping ads,” but your strategy does need to adjust in how you’re thinking about optimizing within that because you are going to go in and make changes. Performance Max is an important piece of Google Ads right now, and just because you’re able to suck in a Google account build, if you’re sucking in a Performance Max campaign and that’s it, well, Bing doesn’t actually have a Performance Max campaign, so you can’t just say, “Yeah, run Performance Max.” It’s labeled different. There’s automation that’s different in there, but you’ve got the opportunity within Microsoft Ads to be more granular and build out similar to what you did, let’s say two years ago, where granular builds are really good. You can control search queries still very heavily, even on shopping. You can still do a lot of that on Bing.
So the automations within Microsoft Ads has not gotten to the level of Google Automation yet. I expect they’ll get there and do some things behind the scenes as they keep digging into Google and seeing what they’re doing so they can duplicate it, but go more granular than you would have on Google Text ads, very similar still, but it’s more on the shopping side that you’re going to change your strategy a little bit and have some of you out there listening probably need single product ad groups on shopping campaigns still on Bing, or at least very refined category level campaigns. Whereas on Google, on a Performance Max, you’re probably getting larger campaigns so you can get the conversion data to allow them to do the work.
And then the other big difference I think is going to be Google has YouTube and Bing doesn’t have anything even close to YouTube, and so the Performance Max campaigns on Google are going to be building video campaigns and putting ads up there, even display campaigns on YouTube for some impressions and top of funnel awareness campaigns. You’ll have some video things on Bing, some connected TV things, but it’s not anywhere close. So you just have to be aware of that, that that area of Google is just not going to exist on Bing.

Jon:
Okay, that brings up a good question for me then, which is what else is different on Bing Ads, right? It can’t just be that I assume they’re trying to differentiate in some way?

Ryan:
They are. A lot of it is real estate on page one, I would say, is the biggest thing which we talked about, but even their real estate in the shopping tab, if you’re like, “Yeah, I’m looking for a product specific to shopping, I know I need to go there,” you’re going to see two rows of shopping. And yesterday when I was doing a lot of test searches to research this, every time we did a search incognito and changed things around in our search query to get different things to ping and show an ad for it, it was very dominant for one advertiser at a time in that. You would see two rows of, for example, this search I was doing was around the rugs, and you would see one search in incognito would be all Pottery Barn except maybe one, and it was like Ruggable, and then you’d do another one and it would be all like E-Rugs. And you’re like, “Well, how come you can’t just do five of this one, five of this one, five?”
Because there was about 20 results on the shopping that were advertising images on shopping. So that’s where we’re coming back to kind of the budget thing is somewhat of the hypothesis there, but it’s just different. I would expect shopping to be a little bit of a heavier piece of the spend level on Microsoft Ads. Review stars, which are really important on Google, if you don’t have them, it’s almost like you’re handicapped in that auction because review stars are worth 15% extra click-through rate. They’re still important on Bing. It’s just very difficult to get them. There’s not as many companies that are actually pushing review stars. And I pinged one of our partners on this yesterday and said, “Talk to me about review stars on Microsoft Ads.” And they’re like, “Oh my gosh, don’t even get me started.”
I was like, “Okay, well, what do you mean? I mean, you’re doing it right?” “Yes, we send review stars to Bing and the reviews to get it to start to populate, but 50% of the time we can’t get them to populate and we don’t get a response from Microsoft on what’s wrong, why it’s not working. Are they changing things randomly through the day?” So we don’t know yet. You want them to find a partner that says they send them to Microsoft Ads, but then temper expectations because it’s still not a well-oiled system. I would say too, because bing.com is so aggressive on real estate to ads, it seems like you can do a lot more with your extensions.
So if you build out your ad extensions, you’ve got your main ad, and then you can extension every category of your site realistically on there and just, you could take up 75% of that first page with one ad if you do it right. So just be aware, Bing says you can add something to an ad, just do it because chances are they’re going to give you more real estate, which often will increase your click-through rate for that.

Jon:
Yeah. It can’t hurt.

Ryan:
It’s never going to hurt. I would advocate for that on Google as well, so that wouldn’t necessarily be a difference, but it’s probably a bigger deal on Bing than it is on Google just because of the opportunity for real estate and there doesn’t seem to be as much testing of extensions or ad types. It’s more like, “You’ve got it, we’ll show it,” and you’re kind of stuck there for a while until there’s some bigger change within the ad system. And then the last piece I would probably say is different is Bing is always focused on images. If you go to bing.com, there’s that big fancy image behind the scenes. If you have PCs and you’re running Windows, there’s always an image now on your login that changes all the time. If you do a search on Bing, you’re going to see lots of images, especially if you’re looking for a product.
I did a search this morning to test a few things. One of them was blue t-shirt, and I mean, there were images all over the place. And as you scroll down, you’ll see there was an Etsy listing that had normal Etsy. It was an Etsy organic result. You would see Etsy, and then below that there was about, I don’t know, 10 to 12 pictures of t-shirts from sellers that was part of the feed from Etsy into Bing. And so there’s just images everywhere. And so if you’re not leveraging multiple images in your feed, you probably need to. I like lifestyle and images. Google’s been focusing more on those as well, but Bing seems to be ahead of the curve in showing various images in different states for a product to be able to generate interest on that.

Jon:
Yeah, I mean, Google shopping seems to really, I mean, you have to have an image to be part of that, right? I mean, that’s what it seems like, so it’s really product heavy and not lifestyle at all on Google that I’ve noticed. And so that could be a differentiating point for Microsoft to try to entice people a little more, but that would require a separate feed, right? You can’t just repurpose the same image feed that you have for Google over to Microsoft.

Ryan:
Well, you use generally the same shopping feed, so if you use like we use a lot of Feedonomics, for example. Feedonomics goes to Google, goes to Bing, goes to Facebook. There’s different columns, and so it’s at its core probably the same, but you might be able for Microsoft to add additional columns that Microsoft wants to say, “Hey, where’s your lifestyle image?” And I’m not the feed expert in our company, but I know enough to be dangerous that if there’s opportunities to add something to a feed, you should probably do it. And then test and measure titles, descriptions. I would say it seems like there are more opportunities to test titles on Microsoft Ads on Bing if they’re not truncating as much. Again, I approach Bing Ads, Microsoft Ads, wherever your brain’s going to force you to use, nomenclature on that.

Jon:
What is the official?

Ryan:
Official is Microsoft Ads now. It was Bing Ads for many, many years, and it’s still on bing.com, but we have to reference it now officially, at least when we’re talking to Microsoft, as Microsoft Ads. And it’s a Microsoft Ads partner. It’s not a Bing partner. So the ads piece and where you’re giving money to them comes under the Microsoft name, but all I say is when you go back a few years on Google, what you know now, you’re like, “Oh, if I had known this, I would’ve been doing that two years ago.” Think about that. Like, okay, this was working well on Google a couple of years ago. That might be closer to where Bing sophistication is on their results pages. And so if there’s ways to game the system by leveraging some of your now techniques on Google might benefit you better on Microsoft Ads, but because there is less competition, if something is working, you double down on it.
And so if we play random numbers, if you’re spending 100 grand on Google a month, you can spend 10 grand on Bing generally speaking. But if your 100 grand a month on Google puts you outside the top 10 in your industry as far as spend level, you might be able to spend 50 or 60 grand a month on Microsoft Ads if you’re able to really leverage some of the changes in your testing and measuring, and you want to get better results. I’m sure you’ve seen this data when you’re looking at analytics and doing conversion rate optimization, that almost 100% of the time, the conversion rates off of any traffic from Bing beats the same traffic on Google.
Like Bing Organic versus Google Organic, the conversion rate on Bing, almost always higher. In PPC, almost always higher. And for me, high level, without understanding all of the nuances behind the scenes of why somebody’s searching and what they’re clicking, it’s probably because people on bing.com doing research don’t actually research. They just click buy and take action, and they’re not as price sensitive. Maybe I’m not fully aware of the reasoning behind it, but I just look at the data and say, “Bing converts better.”

Jon:
You’ll take it.

Ryan:
If you can spend more there, spend more there.

Jon:
So without turning this into a full-blown commercial for Microsoft, I have to ask, what other companies and platforms should people be considering outside of Google and Microsoft Ads? I was going to say Bing, but let’s get it. I’ll call it the right thing.

Ryan:
Well, when it comes to capturing search, there’s really not a lot out there. If you’re in Russia, Yandex I believe is 60 some percent of the search, but I doubt anybody in Russia is paying attention to us on this podcast, at least. DuckDuckGo is going to hide search volume and they’re going to just play on Google Ads. On Google there’s probably going to be something there. Yahoo Gemini may be the only one from a search capture standpoint that would make sense for some advertisers. They have a product called Gemini because Yahoo has deals with both Microsoft Ads and Google that they’re using them to populate search results, except for certain areas where Yahoo Gemini will take precedent on their platform and say, “Okay, well you’ve got Yahoo, Gemini, you’re managing it directly. We’ll let you have certain ad sets that aren’t available to the general public through other platforms.”
But that really would capture it from a search and shopping standpoint. But at the end of the day, without being a commercial for it, there’s no reason not to do it. If you’ve got the budget and Google’s working, Microsoft should work at least as well, if not better. Sometimes, I will say this, you do have to challenge your agency to do it because it is not nearly as user-friendly to optimize an account on Microsoft Ads as it is on Google. It’s just they don’t spend as much on the platform itself at this point. At least it seems to make it as user-friendly. And so some agencies will say, “Yeah, we’ll put it up there, but we may or may not optimize it.”
So make sure you’re looking at your change history seeing, okay, are they doing any work, especially if they’re charging you, or could you just almost set it and forget it while somebody manages your Google? The vast majority of you listening could probably do that. It just makes sense to be there, at least on your brand terms, and then get a feed up there and put some average ROAS that makes sense for your brand within there to let it do some work for you.

Jon:
Awesome. Well, thank you for schooling me on Microsoft Ads today. I had no idea that their market share was where it is, but I’m excited to see them continue to grow and also to know that there’s a lot of opportunity there because I’ve always assumed that was the case based on the conversions, which we talked about. You called out there, but I was unaware that the opportunity could be as rich as it is. So yeah, that sounds like a good plan for anybody who’s advertising to go there as well.

Ryan:
Yeah, looking forward to seeing some results. If you have results, let us know. I’d love to hear some stories, good or bad, on what’s happening on Microsoft from your perspective. I have a lot of clients on it, but I’m always open for more data.

Jon:
Love it. All right. Well, thank you, Ryan. Hopefully you hear something from some folks.

Ryan:
Thank you, Jon.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.