If you’re a digital marketer in today’s world, it’s not uncommon to manage ad campaigns on multiple search engine platforms. For example, we at Carnegie utilize Google AdWords and Bing Ads to promote advertising campaigns for our higher education clients (depending on their needs).
Digital marketers continually work to keep up with and master these ever-changing search engine platforms—whether it be new offerings, advancements, or tips and tricks to get the biggest ROI from a given search engine advertising campaign. Staying on top of these updates is crucial in helping us optimize our campaigns to the fullest. But it can be hard to keep track of, fully grasp, and implement every single update these paid advertising platforms have to offer.
Just when you’re finally up to speed and feeling comfortable with all the newest offerings from Google AdWords, imagine adding a whole new search engine platform to the mix: Bing Ads. The task can seem daunting. But not to worry—Bing has followed in Google AdWords’ footsteps for most of their updates. Many of the offerings that make our lives easier and help us manage our campaigns more effectively and efficiently in Google AdWords are now available in the Bing Ads platform as well.
Here are our favorite capabilities that both Google AdWords and Bing Ads offer:
Expanded text ads
This past summer Google AdWords launched expanded text ads. Advertisers can now create longer text ad copy with two headline fields (30 characters each), a description line (80 characters), and two optional path fields for the ad’s display URL (15 characters each). Similarly, this year Bing rolled out expanded text ads on their platform as well. Advertisers can set up expanded text ads on the Bing Ads user interface or directly import expanded text ads from their Google AdWords accounts (learn about how to set up expanded text ads in Bing here). Advertisers now have the flexibility to craft a more comprehensive and targeted text ad on both platforms!
The benefit: advertisers have more control over their messaging, and these expanded text ads provide mobile, desktop and tablet users with more information on an advertiser’s offerings.
Shared budgets
In Google AdWords, digital marketers can assign one shared budget across multiple campaigns. With this strategy, marketers can set a shared budget which will automatically be distributed based on which campaign needs it most. Bing also recently announced that it has implemented a shared budget feature for all Bing Ads campaigns.
The benefit: this saves marketers time monitoring, pacing and adjusting budget allocations across campaigns.
Device bidding
In Google AdWords, advertisers can include bid adjustments for each type of device. If your ads are doing well on mobile and have a low cost per conversion, you’re able to bid up on that device to get more traction and divert more budget towards that device to increase ROI and CTR. Now the same is true for Bing Ads. Bing is giving advertisers more control in setting bid adjustments by device and, most importantly, will be able to target tablets separately from desktops with different bid adjustments. Advertisers can separately choose to increase or decrease a bid adjustment on PC, tablet, and mobile devices, with PCs ranging from a 0% to +900% bid adjustment, and tablets and mobile ranging from a -100% to +900% bid adjustment.
The benefit: this gives advertisers more control over device-level bidding so that we can bid up or down on a certain device type based on where we’re seeing the most engaged traffic.
Managing an ad campaign on multiple search engine platforms can be tricky, but with some of our favorite tools offered on both Google AdWords and Bing Ads, it’s not as difficult as it seems. Need help setting up a campaign on multiple search engine platforms? Carnegie can help! Reach out, and we’ll guide you along the way.
You can follow Laura on twitter, @LauraEGanci.