Bing Ads -- Are you leaving money on the table? (31)
Hi everyone!
From somebody who is profitable day in, day out on Bing Ads, I just want to take this opportunity to let you all know that it's definitely a traffic source worth testing. I've been using it for cost-per-sale campaigns for quite some time. I am sure it will work just as well for CPA (something I am looking to get into now -- though having a hard time getting approved by reputable CPA networks! Ahh, the "newbie". 
)
Some things you may not know (just quickly, off the top of my head!):
- The traffic is there. Bing users make up 33% of the search market. Don't pay attention to traffic estimation tools, and ALWAYS use broad match modifier. DO NOT LIMIT YOURSELF to exact keywords on Bing. If you can master negative keywords (I have some secret tactics in this department!) you can make 100k a year sitting on your hands. It's probably easier with CPA than the way I'm doing it (outsourcing/creating huge infoproduct projects, then testing like crazy).
- Conversion is solid -- search.bing.com converts at about 3% for $39 ebooks in the health/treatment vertical. Bing users are less tech-savvy, and generally older.
- Vouchers... work. I think the voucher scheme is closing in June of this year (for the $200 vouchers), but I've made several $270+ accounts (three vouchers) for about $20 each to test new markets/angles. I've stopped doing this. It's good if you're new, with no money. My tips: fiverr VCC, VPS, wait 2-3 weeks before placing ads. If you have the inclination, you can make 50 of these accounts in a weekend of dedicated work ($13.5k ad spend), spending $1000 in the process (maybe less). If your ROI is 40%, you've just killed it!
- While others are using shady tactics on Adwords to compete against themselves, you are allowed to advertise for the same keyword using multiple ads on Bing/Yahoo. You can dominate an entire ad sidebar, or the mainline/top ads. It's perfectly legal, you just need to "provide a different experience" in each ad/LP. You can't have multiple ads with very slight variations. You can't use the same landing page. What you can do is use ads that are different enough, coupled with landing pages that provide a different user experience. I have made this work very well.
- $2000 monthly ad spend is enough to get a traffic rep.
- In my experience, account history, campaign and adgroup/keyword history have no major impact on performance. Your clicks will get lower over time, but it's purely a matter of the basics of ad serving -- get your CTR up and slowly lower your bid. It's not like AdWords where you need multiple accounts to test new markets, then move profitable campaigns with good CTR/QS into a "Gold" account to further increase profits and keep that account in good stead. It's much easier to work with.
Negatives I can point out:
- MY BIGGEST GRIPE: Referrers. Ugh! You can't tell Bing to not show your ads on sites like Yahoo Voices, Yahoo Answers and Bing Images and so on. I think of these are more content network-type targets, so it frustrates me to see good money being wasted there. As always, you can use a referrer-based PHP redirect to test offers on these referrers only (for my niche product campaigns, I directed Answers/Voices users to an opt-in page). The two best performing referrers are by far search.yahoo.com and search.bing.com - a pity Bing Ads won't allow us to have more granular control. I'm sick of supporting their shitty non-search properties. I've had to close one of my accounts (I used it to run only one campaign) because even after tweaking and optimising, it was too much hassle to get into the black. I've let Bing know of my frustrations, hopefully they'll sort it out. If your campaign has an unusually high number of shitty referrals, email them, maybe they will change this finally.
- MY SECOND BIGGEST GRIPE: Day- and week-parting in Bing Ads is done based on the USER'S timezone, not your account timezone! I use Prosper which doesn't even have IP/Geo tracking, so when I first was tasked with finding out the locations and timezones of all of my converted users for one month, it was quite laborious to bring up data that might be useful. I had some SOLID data from Prosper directly (could see 8-hour gaps where people were clicking a lot but not buying!) but this was all for MY timezone. Really frustrating when you can't have a single reference point of optimisation. Wish it was more like Adwords in that respect.
- Inconsistent ad approvals. Get a rep.
- Immature interface. No desktop editor for Mac (yet).
Any questions?
Cheers.
Also, just a quick note:
I found basically no useful information when looking to advertise on Adcenter (now Bing Ads). WSOs are terrible (you could expound on the above and create a killer one, but PPC doesn't do too well over at the WF... especially where testing is involved!)
Look through the Bing Ads support documentation and you will always find your answers. It's a traffic source that will only become bigger.
Golden Post right there ^^^^^
Edit: well I meant the first one but was too slow in posting - you get the point
Also, this might seem weird, but I've never had an account banned. I have a very specific reason to use multiple accounts.
Itching to get into a CPA network!
Why adsimills specifically?
Dating offers! Though I've also just applied for CPATrend who specialise in that, too. If they accept me I won't need Adsimilis until I'm pushing some volume later down the track. Glad you enjoyed my post, jonemd! Any questions about Bing, I'll be happy to answer.
I have been doing Adcenter ads for a client for the past 8 months and he seems to be happy with the traffic (he keeps paying :P ). It is a service rather than CPA product. But recently I've started doing some CPA on Adcenter with Neverblue dating offers and the ROI seems to be around 15 - 30%. Getting the clicks but not much conversion, especially US traffic (weird?).
The CPC is good for dating too..around $0.11 - 0.20. Any suggestion on how to improve the dating campaign?
PS : For now I am doing DL
More ads, more keywords, see what keywords make the sales, see what ads make the sale {AdId} and take your best performing landing pages and ads and make them different enough to qualify as a "unique user experience", then put your stuff up multiple times.
I am planning on getting CPV Lab to see what states make sales for me (without taking Prosper's data and using IP to location batch converters). You can target converting states in Bing, so you should probably do that.
You have conversions so it's a matter of analysing WHERE, and also quite importantly WHEN.
Your campaign sounds like one that will be carved in such a way that will result in minimal traffic but maximum ROI.
Remember, Bing has terrible day-parting capability (offering useless 3- and 4-hour slots, all in the user's timezone -- grr!) so you need a lot of conversions to pull the trigger -- otherwise it's not relevant and the campaign will show that days and weeks from now.
I've had enquiries regarding the vouchers.
Method:
VPS (US IP, get one with multiple IPs for a few bucks a month, so you can switch when it's time to make a new Bing account).
First two vouchers -- $25 + $50: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster + sign up to Bing here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/sma...ness/affiliate
Third voucher costs $19 for a $200 voucher. Deal expires June 30th, 2013. http://www.kevinlee.net/book/
Kevin even has rewritten the page to mention "bulk" orders of the eBook. LOL. So many people are out there with $20k+ ad spends from a month of solid .info (cheap domain)-creating.
Automation and organisation is key. This is great traffic.
$70-ish gets you $900 in ad spend and a Bing education.
Be very CONSISTENT with new names, addresses etc and picking a phone number in the area code you "live in" when applying to Bing. Always wait at least a week or two before placing ads. All three vouchers will go on the same acount (even though you're not supposed to do this, it works every time, there were days when a $300 voucher was placed on top to make $575 accounts -- this voucher expired a few months ago).
Accounts generally get disabled 1-2 weeks after failed CC payment (some accounts spend $350 before it triggers the CC in post-pay, I believe...). Use a prosper installation separate to your main account to keep everything nice and separate.
If you do the above and promote Tinnitus No More (or whatever it's called on Clickbank) with the broad keywords +tinnitus and +ringing +ears, with negatives -[ringing ears] and -[tinnitus] (to target peripheral traffic but not general info seekers), you will break even with even crappy ads. Try it, I did it 3 times in a row. Now focusing on more authentic business ventures.
If you wanted to work on that campaign, you then analyse the 900 clicks you get in those 3 accounts, see what converted etc. Much easier with CPA to get statistically relevant data faster.
Nice sharing bro !!!
do you only focus on bing right now?
I can refer you to Sean if you want
have skype for chat?
@redrummr: Great information. Can I clarify a few things just so I know I understand what you are saying.
What are the, "but I've made several $270+ accounts" that you speak of and where do I buy them?
Are you saying set up a brand new BING account for each voucher and then wait a week or two before setting up your ad campaigns?
More silly questions soon I don't doubt!! :-)
Originally Posted by andyscraven
BTW -- existing programs suck. I've got Greg Davis' Adcenter course ($500) and it's terrible. He's raking it in with CPA, but the info he gives in the course isn't good. I've also gone through a few WSOs on Adcenter and all their info is even worse, if not dangerously bad.
I love how the Warriorforum people say "Bing doesn't allow" -- I just LOL. Bing has allowed me diret linking to clickbank offers for weeks at a time with a display URL that was not my destination URL, nor was it owned by me or even registered -- I did it purely to test which domain wins the conversion race!
INTERESTING NOTE:
One of my last campaigns had ads with display URL as "getover[medical condition].com" -- after a few weeks, Bing told me "Get Over" is a prohibited term, I had to switch the domain to somethign less "action-ey" and my conversion rate plummeted. WTF? I contacted my rep and he couldn't do anything. New domain, even when appended with "\getover[medical condition]" or prefixed eg."getover[medical condition].domain.com" did not convert as well. I was pissed lol. Sometimes the domain can make the difference, but I'm sure testing would have eventually found an even better alternative -- the profits were just too low, I didn't want to bother.
Funny, because you can run "cure" traffic including in the domain -- just not in India. (I advertise to US/CA, and keywords including "cure" bring up a notice in my account, saying that for India only -- even though I'm not advertising to them -- "cure" is prohibited.)
Also note: only CA and US traffic allows broad match modifier (which you should always use). For other countries they don't allow it due to low traffic.
I never use phrase match. If there are 4-5 words I might use phrase match for in Adwords, I +put +them +all +like +this (broad match modifier), and it gets all the targeted traffic you'd get using phrase, and that little extra bit too.
Many more tips + pictures coming in the next 24-48 hours. It seems people are interested in Bing.
Originally Posted by gadmei
do you only focus on bing right now?
I can refer you to Sean if you want
have skype for chat?
I'll be posting some more insight into this platform soon.
PM'ed you my Skype ID. See you when I see you.
Awesome share here, just a quick question on targeting keywords.
For dating let's say I want to target kw : Russian women , do I add it +Russian +Women ? How about the negative keyword?
Just need to clear this part because earlier I did +Russian Women and traffic wasn't too good.
Originally Posted by thatguy
EDIT: I will be posting some excellent negative keyword strategies later on. Some of these you will not have heard about anywhere else!
Ok, a few more things, and a bit of elaboration. Some of the below isn't exactly Bing-specific (sorry, breaking my own rule lol).
Traffic Estimation
I don't use Bing's search estimation tool. Factoring in negative keywords and everything else, it's not the best to use. Just throw your stuff up, especially if you can see other ads.
You can use GOOGLE's keyword tool, and use the following multiplier to determine the sort of traffic you're going to get:
* 0.5x the traffic, if it's likely a subject dominated by people 30 and over
* 0.3x the traffic, if it's likely a subject dominated by people <30
Reason being, Bing doesn't have the hippest crowd, but has 33% of the market (google has over 60%, so Bing has about half the search traffic Google has, with more than 50% in certain demographics who don't know how to change from Bing to Google LOL). I tried to run a hip-hop-related product on Bing and the traffic was abysmal. Not only that, but all of a sudden (at least with cost-per-sale) you are losing the demographic that matters the most: have credit card, may whip it out. Most younger people use Google.
Bing is, however, starting to catch the younger crowd by offering a better image search feature and a superb video search feature -- it crawls more porn sites than you did at 13!
Your Starting Bid
Between $0.60 and $1.90 (I've been at both ends). It really depends on the product, the demographic, and what stage of the buying cycle they are in (from interruption marketing [cheap] to comparing quotes [$$$]).
Generally, think of what your final CPC might be if you were to convert at 10% for a CPA offer or 2% for an infoproduct and running at 150% ROI. Then double that CPC and that is your starting bid. 
(Yes, lose money until you establish good ads and a good, confident platform for running this campaign for many months to follow.)
Campaign Optimisation
- Order of optimisation is important.
Remove unprofitable times (if you have the data) before removing unprofitable keywords (beyond the very obvious negatives where no relation to the market exists).Before removing a keyword or a part of the day/week, make sure it hasn’t been mostly affected by one “bad” other ingredient (eg. referrer, country, device), especially if you've already removed that ingredient. Look for heavy "drivers" of keyword clicks before deciding to take keywords out of your whole campaign. It may be the drivers that need attention. I hope this makes sense!Inch your way into positions 2-3. I find this good for profitability in a competitive market. Spots 4-5 do not show for all searches -- only the mainline (top) ads show for many searches!!! Position 2.13 is where it's at in my book.Quality Score for keywords and campaign: necessary to "unlock" traffic that is otherwise unavailable. The more targeted you are (if using broad match modifier, how many more +WORDS +are +in +your +keyphrase) the higher your quality score and it helps with CTR obviously. Also there's a Bing support page that tells you where to put search queries and related terms. I often pass the search query in the URL, onto my site, and put it as a "h1" tag that is CSS'ed to not be H1-lookin' but still visible/legit, then I also call it out using CookieMonster WP plugin as an ALT tag in a few images. This seems to help a lot. I also call the tag out in the footer to ensure the keyword appears 4-5 times throughout my code.
Things I Do That Are Maybe Weird But They Work For Me So Yeah
- Remove tablets from targeting (in addition to mobile devices), for cost-per-sale offers.
- Sometimes to force targeting of women, I set my bid at half of what it is, then set my demographic targeting to +0% for men, +100% for women of all ages. The results are mixed, you need to experiment. Bing doesn't know every woman, and so the unsure-abouts won't even be able to see your ad due to low bid -- they need to be using a service like Hotmail where Bing/Microsoft know their gender via cookie.
More Notes
- The most profitable campaigns are those incorporating +broad +match +modifier “hills” sculpted with negative keywords, with eventual branching out into targeted ads (resulting in better CTR, lower CPC) once stats start rolling in… those hills can be gold.
- CTR: aim for 1-2% with broad match (1% is good for broad match in many cases, while getting data the easy way with one or two ad groups and keywords). In the mainline, with good ads, you will get up to 14-15% CTR, I usually average around 9-13%. For position 2-3 you are doing well with 5% CTR.
Negative Keyword Strategies - Campaign Optimisation
Negative keywords will improve your CR, CTR, lower your CPC and increase ROI.
How to find them:
- Keyword tools that spit out everything under the sun -- anything absolutely not related, must GO!
- Wikipedia
- IMDB and Google: have movies been made that involve your main keyword? Add them as exact negatives, and the main actors that played in them.
- Google and Bing top 30-50 results -- scan for websites that are just not related at all, add a ton of keywords as negatives (you can't have TOO many negatives) -- be carefull about your match types as always
- Looking at campaign data: do not remove a keyword if it hasn't converted in 20 clicks. BUT, *do* remove words that appear in larger keywords. In one campaign I made 80 conversions and none contained the word "what" -- I searched prosper for "what" and saw 300-400 clicks. It might have been the wrong thing to do (who knows the maths, aye?) but I negatived "what".
- When you type in your keyword into Google's search bar, it comes up with suggestions (auto-complete) as you type. Type your keyword, followed by a space and then the letter A. Note all suggestions. Do the same for letters B through Z. (There are scraper programs that do this, but I do it manually.) Take out all obvious negatives, leave all themed keywords in there though until you have good data.
Super sneaky SECRET Negative Keyword tactic
One time I put up an ad that was MEANT to lose me money. I used Bing Ads' dynamic insertion keyword token in the headline and put up one of those classic ads: "looking for {KeyWord}? I've got it, take a look!" -- something like that. High bid, multiple ads = I got a report of clicks that the {AdID} got me... and some of those keywords were definitely not related to my market. Negatives them, so I never appeared for them again. Sometimes you need to draw in the clicks to find out for what KWs your ad is appearing, then take those out and then go more targeted. Your CTR will have an easier time hitting higher numbers that way.
Ok well this wasn't very sneaky or secret LOL. I see companies like About.com and AskJeeves do this sort of stuff all the time... it's useful. I don't think they do it for the same reason I do it though.
Btw I am going to take a break from posting so I can take action over the next 2-3 weeks. Just absorb what is here, know there is money to be made, and take action if you have the budget. First-timers with low budgets: Bing may not be your best bet... just yet. I'll be hitting that sweet, quality Bing traffic with CPA hard as soon as I get into these networks.
This is golden! +rep
Hey redrummr, fantastic post on Ad Center full of golden nuggets! I just have a question for you. Can you clarify what you mean by "hills"? I'm unfamiliar with that term and I'm not grasping that concept.
Originally Posted by redrummr
Glad you liked the post!
Originally Posted by thomasbhm
Remember like 40% searches are unique (I read that somewhere, can't remember where!), so why limit yourself? And why limit yourself to phrase match? It can work sometimes, but take this example:
a) "car insurance seattle" = 20 clicks per day
b) +car +insurance +seattle = 80 clicks a day (it will trigger for more keywords)
The longer and the more words you have, the less of a difference there will be in CTR on the ad, while at the same time receive more clicks (eg. seattle insurance for car).
Just check your stats to filter out clicks you don't want to receive again. You should update your negative keywords every day, then every week after being profitable and after a while, every month.
A word on plurals: your ad will trigger for plural and singular terms REGARDLESS of whether you have included both of them (except with exact match I believe) -- you only need one. You can take the singular or plural out using a negative keyword.
Example:
+car +loans
triggers for
car loan
and
car loans
You can take [car loan] out, so it only shows for the plural term from here on out.
If you have TWO DIFFERENT ads for the singular and plural keywords, Bing uses the ad for the plural of every time.
Thanks for clearing that up redrummr. Sounds like you really got this system down. You are right there aren't a lot of valuable resources on AdCenter so this was a huge help. I didn't even know about Broad Match Modifier before this, I can see how valuable that is. I'm switching my campaigns up as we speak.
What do you think about separating broad match ad groups from the exact and phrase match... I bet that would help keep your CTR higher on the exact and phrase match groups which in turn may serve your ad more.
Great share.
Thank you!
How much for the little gir, er, I mean super secret negative KW tactics?
Do you have some other suggestion besides leaving adcenter account (after entering vcc and coupons) for 2 weeks before creating the ads on bing.? i am trying and get all of my account was banned withour any reason.
maybe you can give another suggestion
Run your first ads to a local pet shop - a few $$. When you do run money-making traffic, run the entire spend down quick.
If all of your accounts were banned you are being careless in some way. Sorry broski. This strategy is not long-term btw.
"If all of your accounts were banned you are being careless in some way" its all about proxies or vps i use or what.? also do we need to match the timezone on our computer?
Originally Posted by redrummr
Had a home warranty offer I was running and ran a few test on a broad base of home warranty related keywords. for each kw, I ran each match type. Heres just 1 result I had that messed me up in my thinking on how things were suppose to work. I had an exact match kw that was "the home warranty" that was converting for me. My tracking was set to show the {querystring}, so basically looked like this s1=the-home-warranty{adid}{matchtype}&s2={querystring} .So now I could see what was being searched to find my ad. Well being this was a exact match kw, I didn't expect nothing but 'the home warranty' as the search query.
Well after a while of just letting the campaign run to build stats, i was finding a lot of queries for home warranties, what is a home warranties, best home warranties, etc..
So when I contacted them, the initial rep said they didn't know and had to escalate it and came back with telling me how there system takes out common words from your kw's like the, top, with etc.... and that also your main focus word can show all the plurals. So I asked why this was happening even with 'exact' match and if this was true then why was there even an exact match. That stumped the guy again so I had to wait for explanation about that as well. They came back and tried to see if it was my 3rd party tracking and I showed them my results and that I was using there token {querystring} to be replaced with the search word. They then said I needed to go into my bing account and look what there system shows I had been showing up for but sure enough the exact match in BIngs own system was still showing what I was showing my my 3rd party tracking.
I might have saved the conversations I had so Ill try to look them up and post them here if people would like to see what they were saying.
Originally Posted by jokogila
If you are not using separate user accounts then I would also suggest CC Cleaner and flash cookie remover but this can sometimes flag your account in my experience .
I personally find that buying VCC from fiver , can also raise a red flag as I think they have a way to pick up batch numbers that can lead to accounts being automatically banned .
Thank you Roger! er I mean redrummer.
Originally Posted by ahefner33
Had a home warranty offer I was running and ran a few test on a broad base of home warranty related keywords. for each kw, I ran each match type. Heres just 1 result I had that messed me up in my thinking on how things were suppose to work. I had an exact match kw that was "the home warranty" that was converting for me. My tracking was set to show the {querystring}, so basically looked like this s1=the-home-warranty{adid}{matchtype}&s2={querystring} .So now I could see what was being searched to find my ad. Well being this was a exact match kw, I didn't expect nothing but 'the home warranty' as the search query.
Well after a while of just letting the campaign run to build stats, i was finding a lot of queries for home warranties, what is a home warranties, best home warranties, etc..
So when I contacted them, the initial rep said they didn't know and had to escalate it and came back with telling me how there system takes out common words from your kw's like the, top, with etc.... and that also your main focus word can show all the plurals. So I asked why this was happening even with 'exact' match and if this was true then why was there even an exact match. That stumped the guy again so I had to wait for explanation about that as well. They came back and tried to see if it was my 3rd party tracking and I showed them my results and that I was using there token {querystring} to be replaced with the search word. They then said I needed to go into my bing account and look what there system shows I had been showing up for but sure enough the exact match in BIngs own system was still showing what I was showing my my 3rd party tracking.
I might have saved the conversations I had so Ill try to look them up and post them here if people would like to see what they were saying.
Or, just as likely, "the" is not considered a word somehow, unless in the middle of the phrase...
Originally Posted by quankaf
https://stmforum.com/forum/forumdisp...rds-Bing-etc-)
Amy
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