What is an ad campaign?
An ad campaign is a series of advertisements you create to promote and market a particular product, service, or idea. It is usually composed of several different elements such as text, images, videos, and other multimedia components. The goal of an ad campaign is to create awareness about your product or service and to drive sales by influencing potential customers. Ad campaigns can be used in both traditional media such as television and radio as well as digital media such as websites and social media platforms. In this article, we discuss Bing and Google Ad campaigns specifically.
What are Bing Ads?
Bing Ads is a digital advertising platform created by Microsoft that enables you to advertise your products and services on the Bing search engine. It offers various features such as targeting options, campaign management, and reporting tools that help you reach your target audience with relevant ads.
With Bing Ads, you can create campaigns for search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising, and remarketing. You can also use its advanced targeting options to target customers based on their demographics or interests. Bing Ads is an effective way to reach potential customers and increase your online visibility.
What are Google Ads?
Google Ads is a powerful tool for businesses to reach potential customers and grow your online presence. It allows businesses to create targeted ads that appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for specific keywords. With Google Ads, you can control your budget, target specific audiences, and measure the success of your campaigns. Google Ads is an effective way to reach the right people at the right time with the right message.
What are the advantages of Bing Ads?
1. Better social extensions
Bing started testing social extensions in 2014, which showed the number of Twitter followers an advertiser has next to their ad. This is obviously hugely important when it comes to social influence. Google also shows their social extensions to Google+ followers, but that platform isn’t very popular.
2. Bing Ads have cheaper CPCs
There is a major difference in the cost per click — it’s a third less than Google Ads. Additionally, Bing Ads generally rank better because there is less competition.
3. Run Bing Ad campaigns in different time zones
With Google Ad campaigns, you must set all the demographic criteria and when you want to change any of them, you must create an entirely new campaign. With Bing, you can change the time, location, and other demographic settings on the same ad campaign.
4. Bing Ads allow more precise demographic targeting
With Bing Ads, you can target a specific ad group and also set your campaign to a specific level of target customer. This makes your ad that much more effective if you know those details for your specific product.
5. Bing Ads enable more precise search partner targeting
In Google, you can target Google search and search partners only. With Bing you can choose between targeting only Bing and Yahoo!, search partners, or a popular service or product. You can also view reports that track which search partners bring you the most traffic and exclude any you don’t like.
6. Bing has broader catch-all searches
Everyone has accidental typos or spelling errors in their searches now and then, and Bing allows for close variant matching that still enables you to get hits despite these errors. Google no longer offers this option.
7. Bing lets you target based on device usage
While Google allow you to target desktop, mobile, and tablet devices at once, Bing lets you focus on whichever one makes the most sense for your ad campaign, and you can exclude the other two. Given the high percentage of paid search clicks on mobile alone, this can have a major impact on how you target your Bing Ad campaigns.
What are the disadvantages of Bing Ads?
1. Less Traffic
Since Bing’s user base is much smaller than Google, you can lose customers if you focus too heavily on it since there are still many others who are not using Bing or Yahoo!.
2. Bing Ads are a bit behind
Technologically, their user interface is slightly more complex and less flexible, and they are slower to improve and expand their features than Google Ads. Their automated bidding function is also more rigid than Google Ads.
3. Less flexible ad copy
You are limited to only 1-2 ad headlines with a maximum of 80 characters, compared to Google Ads’ 90 characters and up to 3 potential headlines.
4. Questionable Customer Support
This isn’t really an issue in terms of the daily campaign operations, but some customers have complained about difficulty in getting good support from Bing.
What are the advantages of Google Ads?
1. Powerful targeting Capabilities
Google’s algorithms based on customer intent are constantly improving, accelerating your ability to reach your target market.
You can choose between bidding for long-tail keyword phases that will serve you warmer leads, or spend more on shorter keyword phrases that may generate more awareness but fewer leads. It all depends on your ad campaign goals.
2. Easy campaign control
The easier it is to run an ad campaign, the cheaper the cost of the team member assigned to the task. Additionally, you can also scale a campaign fast if you see it’s working well.
3. Budget Control
It’s easy to keep an accurate tab on your campaigns by setting exactly the number of bids and cost per bid you are willing to spend, and you are only charged when the ad is clicked on.
4. Boost brand awareness
While your top goal in using ad campaigns is usually sales and leads, Google Ads also helps you build your brand awareness at the same time. Your ad will probably get viewed many times by the same people, given how many hours the average user spends online. Awareness always adds sales.
5. More conversions
The platform is the biggest, has the biggest user base, and if you are applying a good marketing strategy across your ad campaign, your landing page (copy and design), and your offer, you can generate significant paid traffic and boost your ranking.
6. More bang for your buck (ROI)
Given the cost of ads, it makes sense that Google Ads has the power to save you money while you spend it based on its ability to target different demographics and three bidding options:
- Cost per click (CPC) — you pay for every click on your ad.
- Cost per thousand viewable impressions (CPM) — you pay based on the number of views of your ad.
- Cost per action (CPA) — you pay based on the actions of the user in response to your ad.
7.Faster results
Organic search engine ranking is a long game. Google Ads help you get results much faster and comes in handy when you need to launch a new product or promote an event (where organic search won’t be sufficient).
What are the disadvantages of Google Ads?
1. No necessary cheap
You may be paying a good price for a competitive keyword phrase and generating a lot of leads, but not all of them will be high quality. Google Ads is a major competitive platform, so based on the level you want to compete, it can become expensive.
2. Heavy management
To get the most ROI out of your ad campaign budget, you need to the know-how to properly optimize your ad campaign, structure the account properly, do keyword research, monitor, and tweak your campaigns as you accumulate more data. Yes, there is some machine learning happening, but you cannot “set it and forget it”.
3. A constant learning curve
The Google Ads platform is constantly evolving, making it more confusing to new users. There are helpful free training courses online, but it still requires time to learn, which implies that you may make a few costly mistakes along the way.
Which is better for small business: Bing Ads or Google Ads?
- User base and targeting — Google has a much larger user base compared to Bing, which means that advertising on Google can potentially reach a larger audience. However, Bing has a more specific audience demographic, which can be beneficial for businesses looking to target a specific group of users such as older, educated, higher-income clients in finance.
- User-friendly — Google Ads is easier to use than Bing, though both have a bit of a learning curve.
- Cost — Bing Ads are cheaper (anywhere from 30-70% depending on where you look and which industries).
Ad campaigns are worth it!
In conclusion, both Bing and Google offer advertising platforms with their own advantages and disadvantages. You need to consider your priorities in terms of your advertising goals, targeting, budget, customer demographics, etc. The more specifics you know about what you’re selling to whom, the more effective your ad campaign will be.
If the idea of figuring this all out and setting up and running your ad campaigns sounds like a headache, contact us for quick tips. Adbot is designed to do all the hard work for you, making ad campaign setup and monitoring, fast, smooth, easy, and most importantly, painless!
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Heideli Loubser helps small business owners grow their audience through marketing and content strategy with actionable and relatable ideas gleaned from over a decade of copywriting.