Microsoft Advertising can help you reach a new group of high-quality customers and increase your return on advertising spend (ROAS). A PPC campaign stands for ‘pay per click’ and for the cost of displaying your website, you are charged a set fee for the service. When customers view and click your ad, they are sent to your website.

Either they make a purchase, request your service, sign up for more information or download your app. Regardless of your businesses function, a Bing ad will focus on keywords and display your website when necessary.

Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, has three search engines — Bing, Yahoo, and AOL — so when you advertise on one platform, your ad is actually seen on all three. As imaginable, having your website being viewed on as many platforms as possible is always a bonus.

Whilst it is no secret that Google is the leading search engine on the market, but this does not mean Bing isn’t worth investing in:

• Bing now has 34% of the desktop search engine market share worldwide
• There are 5.4 billion monthly searches conducted on the Bing Network
• 136 million unique searchers use the Bing Network

These figures indicate that any advertisement on Bing is likely to have a large audience.

As mentioned, it is known that Google is the leading search engine at the moment. But what Bing lacks in volume, it certainly makes up for in performance. Although budgets fluctuate by industry and every single advertiser, one particular digital marketing agency found that Bing only spent 20%-35% of their AdWords campaign equivalent.

This means that businesses can still reach a large audience and (often) cheaper prices per click.

A Bing ad is an online advertising solution that businesses use to promote their products and services on Bing’s search engine, YouTube and other sites across the web. Bing ads also allows advertisers to choose specific goals for their ads, like driving phone calls or website visits. With a Bing adsaccount, advertisers can customise their budgets and targeting, and start or stop their ads at any time.

• Search Network campaigns – usually text form, these ads can show on Google Search results pages when someone searches for a product or service that’s similar to yours
• Display Network campaigns – usually image form, these ads appear on websites or apps that your customers visit
• Video campaigns – usually 6 or 15 second videos, these ads show right before or during Bing Video content

Your Bing ads cost is determined by your budget settings. Bing ads can work with almost any budget. You’re only charged when users interact with your ad, like clicking to visit your website or to call your business. With Bing Ads, there is no minimum spend requirement, and no required contract length – you can stop your ads anytime. The cost of a click or call can vary based on a few factors.

SEO is a longer term game and involves the correct set up of your website and online presence, ultimately to bring you more organic search and referral traffic. You don’t pay for this traffic, but you’ll pay with time and money getting it right.

SEO should always be an important element of your digital marketing mix, and it’s often overlooked and underestimated by both business and web developers.

Bing Advertisement is a fast way of bringing in targeted traffic to your website. It is fast to set up, and a far faster way to generate the traffic than SEO (generally). Both are ongoing investments, but you’ll only pay for AdWords clicks when people are interested in your product (generally).

With SEO you have to invest before you get the traffic. With Bing Advertisements, you generally only pay when people click through to your website.

Both are important. Certain SEO elements will help improve the quality of your ad campaigns.

It is important to understand that running paid advertising with Bing will not make any difference to your organic search rankings, although it may improve the click through rate of your organic listings (due to searchers subtly seeing your brand in an advert before scrolling down).

There are some great staff at Bing, but when you call the main helpline you are unlikely to get the same person. If you do they have to help many people and will not be able to help with more detailed elements like tracking return on investment and discussing the best goals available to you.