Paid Search (PPC) Content How to create a campaign in Bing Ads Apr 26th, 2018 While Google gets the majority of the coverage (and most of the spend), Bing is by no means letting up in its efforts to compete with Google – so it pays, literally and figuratively – not to miss out on Bing Ads What is Bing Ads? Microsoft’s answer to AdWords, Bing Ads will appear pretty familiar to anyone familiar with AdWords. Instead of appearing in Google searches, however, ads placed through Bing Ads will appear on Bing searches. As with Google, the ads appear both at the top and right hand side of most search results, marked ‘Ad’. How to create a campaign The first step for constructing an ad in Bing Ads is to create the campaign it will run as part of. If you haven’t imported your campaigns from AdWords, you’ll need to select your account and select ‘Campaigns’ from the top menu. As you can see, you can then select ‘Create campaign’ by clicking on the button. This will take you to an option menu from which you can select your campaign goals. These options are fairly self-explanatory, with the first four intended to increase the volume of a site visits, physical visits, conversions or calls and the last two to set up a particular Bing product type (Dynamic search ads or Shopping Campaigns). Dynamic search ads: – useful if you have a large website or number of products and you want ad customisation to happen automatically based on the content of your website. Shopping Campaigns: – useful if you want to increase product sales, as you can showcase your inventory on search results pages (SERPs) with product images. Once you’ve selected the aim of your campaign, there are four steps to completing the initial set up process. The four steps of campaign creation 1. Campaign settings These are reasonably self-explanatory, but for the sake of clarity we’ll go through each in turn: Campaign name: – within the available 128 characters, you will need to name your campaign in a clear, concise and memorable way. It needs to describe the campaign and be easy to find when you need to amend it and have multiple campaigns running. Campaign budget: – we’ll deal with budgets a little more in another chapter, but it’s safe to say that you need to ensure that your budget is affordable and is delivering an acceptable return on investment (ROI) to help grow your business or achieve the campaigns aims. Language: – as the image shows, this is fixed once you move to the next step, so ensure you’ve selected the right language for the campaign. Location: – this will determine the locations that will be served your ads. Depending on the aims of your campaign, you can choose to have it appear in your specific country, in all available countries, or within a set 25 mile area. Who: – this allows you to set one of two (or both) options for who will be shown your ads: People in your targeted locations: – your ads will appear only for people who are physically in your targeted location(s). People searching for or viewing pages about your targeted locations: – your ads will show to people outside of your area, but only when they search for or view webpages about your targeted location(s). 2. Ad groups & keywords The next section of the process is to select the keywords and ad groups for your campaign. As a beginning, this screen has an ideas box which can give you some ideas for both ad groups and keywords (if you want to develop your keyword strategy, you can find out in our Advanced Guide to PPC: Strategy). You get these ideas by filling in your URL and industry and clicking the search icon. By adding some of these keyword ideas to an ad group, building out a number of ad groups and adding more, or importing them from your keyword research, you can then refine the keywords using match type syntax: Once you have the keywords you want and the syntax in place to ensure they’re used in the right contexts, you can move to the next step. 3. Ads & ad extensions This step is where you’ll actually create the ads that will be shown in relevant searches and is second only to your keyword research in terms of importance. The right ad, shown to the right people at the right time can do wonders for a brand. The initial screen you’ll see looks like the following: We’ll go in to the top box in more detail in a moment, but the bottom box in the image above (and the boxes below that) provides the chance to add extensions. Sitelink extensions Sitelink extensions are additional links that will display below some search ads. By filling this in, you can differentiate your ad from the competition and potentially offer a second solution to the search query in the same ad. Callout extension Callout extensions are a great way to highlight a specific appropriate offer, product or service – such as free delivery, 24 hour support etcetera. Structured snippet extension Comprised of a header and a list of between three and ten values that relate to it, structured snippet extensions allow you to add context to your ads. Location extensions By adding your business locations to a location extension, you can automatically display the closest location to the searcher. Particularly useful for brands reliant on store or physical location visits, the extension will show the nearest location within a 50 mile radius of their position. These are created at a campaign level and are applied to all ad groups in that campaign. Review extensions As with all parts of the ad, these are subject to review from Bing, so ensure only reviews from reputable sources are used. This extension allows you to add a snippet of text from a review in addition to the source of the review – helping you to spread the approval of your consumers to your potential consumers. 4. Creating your ad The ad creation box is essentially a deconstruction of everything that will appear on screen for your ad (other than the extensions). Final URL: – this is the URL of the landing page to which your ad will send your consumer when they click on the ad. Title Part 1 and 2: – your title is separated in to two sections of 30 characters (including spaces). These are separated automatically by a hyphen – so be careful that it won’t look odd in the middle. These can be expanded slightly using dynamic text which will be given the placeholder {param1} and will be replaced automatically by the text associated with that placeholder (location name, product, discount, etcetera). Path: – this is the simplified path for the URL (your actual URL will most likely contain tracking codes). This is limited to 15 characters per section, so is fairly restrictive, but should contain the keyword or offer that the ad is promoting. Ad text: – you will need to use your 80 characters well, here. Quick, catchy and informative, your ad copy is where you need to really convert the attention earned by your title. See the next section for some hints. Preferences: – checking this box will indicate to Bing that you want the ad to be a Bing Intent Ad, unlocking some additional features (such as adding an image) in order to optimise for native delivery. Mobile URL: – ideally, by now, your mobile URL should be the same as the desktop URL, but this does allow you to direct mobile consumers to a different URL if required. Budget and bids This section is where you’ll set the budgets for your campaign. Campaign budget: – This sets the budget for the campaign. By expanding ‘daily budget options’, you can see two options – the standard option spends evenly throughout the day; the accelerated option spends as quickly as appropriate. Ad group bid: – this is the bid for all keywords in this ad group. These bids apply to ads delivered on search results pages. Bid strategy: – Sets how you want to manage your bids: Maximise Clicks – sets your bid to earn the most clicks. Enhanced CPC – tries to achieve the best conversion. Manual – sets the bid you suggest. There you have it, your guide to creating your first Bing Ads campaign. 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