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Recently, we took over a client's Google Adwords Account and Bing Ads Account and did our typical Google Analytics deep dive to figure out where immediate optimization could occur to trigger short term wins and ROI. This client in particular is straight up eCommerce, selling direct to consumer on the Magento platform.

One of the first things we noticed was that their Bing Ads Return on Ad Spend number had dropped from like 500% to barely over 100% in the last six months, pretty rapidly and alarmingly.

This basically means they were spending say $5k per month and getting back $25k in revenue, and now were spending $5k but getting back around $5,500. Basically losing money. After digging in and optimizing where I could, I knew there had to be something else happening, so I did what any practical digital marketer should do - I called Bing.

So apparently there are three default settings that absolutely drain the daily budgets of advertisers without them knowing it. (Kind of a stupid move by Bing if you ask me, but oh well, we were able to fix it and get our client back on track). Here are the three things every advertiser needs to know about Bing Ads.

  1. Settings > Location Targets > Uncheck "People searching for or viewing pages about your targeted locations." Why? Well let's say you do business only in the U.S. or only in North America. If you leave the Bing default settings as is, you'll end up paying for clicks from Dubai, India and several other countries to where you don't offering shipping and where nobody will walk into your brick and mortar location ever. It's really bad that Bing does this, but it's easy to adjust now that you know, and you won't pay for useless clicks that drain your budget.
  2. Settings > Other Settings > Add Distribution > Change to "Bing, AOL and Yahoo Search Only." This is so that you don't show up on weird partner network sites like those shown on the Syndicated Search Network. Nobody wants to be on "duckduckgo" and "zapmeta.com" and others.
  3. Keyword Match Types: Avoid "Exact" and do "Phrase" instead. Phrase will give you Exact. Only do one of each. If you double bid, it hurts your campaigns and makes them less effective. On broad matches, do broad match modifiers instead. The video above shows you how this is done.

There's obviously a ton more that needs to be done to manage Bing Ads Campaigns and drive return on investment for your business or your clients, but these three things must be addressed before anything else happens from a strategic standpoint.

As always, we're happy to help if you need any assistance!

Happy bidding!

Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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