Bing Launches New Reporting: What the Changes Mean to You

 

It’s been a few weeks now, but the Bing changes from March are still in full swing and still have businesses trying to gather the pieces. Bing is the third largest search engine (Google being number one and YouTube being number two) in the U.S. controlling 16.5 percent of the search marketing, so it’s important that you don’t count this one out. Following Bing trends will only help keep you ahead of the competition that has its head buried in Google updates.
The Biggest Bing Ad Changes from March
There were seven changes made to Bing in the month of March. According to Tina Kelleher, Community Manager of Bing, the changes incorporate user feedback with “a special emphasis around building out your reporting toolbox and improving user interface.” A few of the most notable changes include:

• Sitelink Ad Extensions. There is already an ad extension that reports information by keyword and by ad, but now users will be able to see sitelink performance data by campaign. It will allow you to see impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC within your campaigns. You can find the new feature under the Reports tab labeled “Ad Extension Details.”
• Keyword Status Columns. Understanding the status of your keywords—active, paused, deleted—can help you make decisions when it comes to optimization and ROI. You can choose from four columns found in the Attributes section: Keyword status, account status, campaign status, ad group status.
• Relative Time Zone and New Language Options. International support was a big thing that Bing focused on this month. You can still choose between today, yesterday, tomorrow, etc.; however now these date ranges will be based on the relative time one that you set for that particular ad. This makes it easy to interpret data from international campaigns. There is also a new language option for countries including Hong Kong, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. This will help advertisers receive data in their desired language.
• Top vs. Other. This is a new column added to the performance report that allows you to see the results of ads when they are at the top of a SERP versus on the right hand side bar (also simply to see which place those keywords were sent to on a SERP). You can see the ROI differences between the two for any given keyword in order to aid your optimization efforts.

Each month Bing comes out with a list of changes made and publishes a write-up about these changes on their blog. You can see the full report with all seven changes as well as screenshots by visiting the Bing Ads release posted last week.
So what do the changes mean to you? Not surprisingly, the Bing updates are there to help businesses. Ignoring the updates would set a company behind. For example, understanding which keywords are active and performing for each pay per click advertising campaign (as opposed to by keyword) makes it easy to optimize your campaigns to the fullest. It also helps to be able to offer data in different languages and to different time zones for International ads, which we all know are becoming more and more important. As you begin to utilize the new updates, I think you’ll find that Bing is moving in the right direction if their goal is to make you life easier and your campaigns more successful.