Arianne Donoghue's slides from her talk at Sheffield DM Vol#4 on Thursday 30th May 2019, titled "Unlocking Bing - Why Bing Ads Deserved Your Time & Money"
18. More people have
access to mobile
phones than to toilets
or running water
epiphany.co.uk
https://www.livemint.com/Politics/kZ7j1NQf5614Uv
O6WURXfO/88-of-households-in-India-have-a-
mobile-phone.html
19. Why are we so
willingly
handing
control over
to Google?
epiphany.co.uk
Puller of weird faces and user of strange gestures.
Straw poll of the room – how many PPC, how many SEO? How long have you worked in the industry?
Our industry is going through challenging times at the moment. I genuinely believe the above is true, not mere hyperbole.
Net Neutrality, Cambridge Analytica… Brexit… as someone who works in advertising, I can draw a direct line between my desire for more data, and all of these things. Brexit is my fault! SEOs tease PPCs for ruining the Internet, but they’re not wrong. They’ve ruined it too. Some people are more culpable than others, but we’ve all played a part.
So in many ways this is the appropriate way to feel. We have built this…
The Internet of Shit. Punctuated by cat videos (which I love) and the occasional bit of goodness from Reddit’s Wholesome Memes
Monopolies are bad.
Why? Because competition encourages innovation, creativity, and often leads to cheaper prices. You only have to look at the US telecoms market to see this in action.
Facebook drove Google to innovate and do more with audiences - which benefits us all
Without competition, we wind up in a situation where "all restaurants are Taco Bell"
Talked before about how search is like the housing market…
PPC = rent and SEO = mortgage
Search engines are the landlord - free to jack up the price of your rent, or clicks at any point and you either have to pay it or find somewhere else to live. But if that landlord owns all the houses, you have no choice - monopolies are bad
So let’s talk about Google for a second.
Google are responsible for nearly 90% of the traffic on the web. That is terrifying.
Think of the power that Google has already, across almost every element of the Internet’s infrastructure. These are all the areas where Google can be considered the market leader and doesn’t even include things like their cloud infrastructure where they compete with AWS and Azure.
Stats like these are problematic on a number of levels, but it shows the power of connection and communication. There’s huge potential for the Internet to be this amazing democratising force, enabling real change.
So why are we so willingly centering power in the hands of a single corporation?
The idea for this talk came after Rand spoke at Brighton in September. Depressing talk, focused on how we can still get traffic from Google… what can we do to optimise?
I wasn’t keen on the idea of just complying with what Google says the web should be. While they tend to try and work with users in mind, what if sometimes they’re wrong? Why is the only choice to give in?
So instead we talked about how we can do this… Because what we need, are options.
Think of how challenging Google are to work with right now
Support knowledge is poor
Often find out about new things from Twitter or from articles on SELand, rather than via reps
Lots of recent changes are distinctly anti-advertiser (automation, exact match, new UI, budget changes, rotation settings, customer match changes)
Think of where we could get to if things continued unchecked and Google gained even more power.
Every time we choose to only spend our search ££ with Google Ads, we have chosen Taco Bell
Every time we laughed at or judged someone for their choice of browser, search engine or operating system (even if they've made no conscious choice and are just using the default), we choose Taco Bell
As advertisers we have choice in where we spend our search £, but if you are worried about privacy, about the Internet remaining free and open then I would argue that you have an obligation to use Bing – as a consumer and as an advertiser.
I promise that it’s worth the effort! Let’s dig into why.
Bing turned 10 this week – on Tuesday. Prior to this it was known as Live Search.
Why should you use Bing? I've broken out my reasons in a few different sections, such as platform features and external extras. I've not focused solely on what's in the platform as I think the whole package is important, or should be important to us as advertisers and as people, who live in a society that relies on the Internet in so many fundamental ways.
In Ads case, the content is the search engine, and the search results.
In the past Bing has had a bad rep for the quality of its results, but 10 years is a long time and MS have done a lot of work integrating AI, ML and more into Bing to make it genuinely competitive and I’d argue there are at least a few ways where Bing offers a better user experience.
For “Moments in time”, you get a much more beautiful, visual experience
The perceived gap in search quality is just that – a perception. Most people cannot tell a difference, or when they can, they prefer Bing. Other tests have been done where logos are removed and added back in.
I'd remind you that we aren't normal people - our usage of search engines and tech in general is so different to the average person - we aren't the best decision makers here.
This is changing - search engine share is increasing all the time, particularly with Bing now powering all Yahoo searches (oh how we have come full circle from 10+ years ago). Currently in the UK they're at 21% on desktop and 35% in the US.
This is changing - search engine share is increasing all the time, particularly with Bing now powering all Yahoo searches (oh how we have come full circle from 10+ years ago). Currently in the UK they're at 21% on desktop and 35% in the US.
Remembering that desktop is still where the majority of important conversions happen, particularly high value ones, it makes sense to not miss out on at least 1/5 of the UK’s Internet users – more if you’re in the US.
While some of the old stereotypes about an older, wealthier audience hold true, the reality is that there are very few users who use exclusively Bing. For many it’ll be dependent on device, context, query. Rather than thinking of it as a “bing” audience, think of it as another location to target the same users – similar to how you’d use Facebook or Amazon in tandem with Google for paid media. The audiences aren’t that distinct or diverse from each other.
Things also stack up when we look at performance. I’ve seen this myself in the performance of campaigns I’m running, but I’m not alone. Bing is generally acknowledged to be cheaper and higher converting.
Time to take you on a whistle-stop tour of what are some of my favourite Bing Ads features.
While this bit of the talk will focus on the features that are unique to Bing, it’s worth pointing out this one, if you can call it a feature. This was a barrier in the early days of the platform and Bing have done as much as possible to remove the friction here – including the feature we’ll talk about next.
Twitter support first – at least a full year before Google.
Access to engineers, monthly product calls, a product advisory group… MS have talked at length at how they see these relationships as collaborations and how important they feel it is for them to listen to their advertisers since if they don’t thrive, MS don’t have a product.
Bing’s API has become a valuable tool for search development and SEOs. Bing’s web search API has opened the door to entrants like DuckDuckGo, allowing us to further the conversation around privacy and data. Plus any application that requires bulk or real-time search data that would be too difficult to get via scraping.
Github acquisition, open-sourcing of code and now adoption of Linux into Windows. Not mentioning an IDE that’s rapidly becoming the go-to for development.
As much as I’m reluctant to see browsers start to use fewer platforms, the development of Edge into a product that runs on Chromium is another great sign about how MS view the future of the web. Yes, some of it will be about increasing browser market share, undoubtedly, but there’s an open and friendly attitude that is not only in complete contrast to the MS we grew up with, but is a nice counterpoint to the walled gardens we see in much else of the industry.
If we value a free and open Internet, then we should promote and use Bing, as users and advertisers
From an Ads perspective, they do often copy Google, sometimes questionably, because Google is dominant
If Google were to become less dominant, others can start setting the pace of change and that's good news for everyone
We are marketers and influencers. So let’s market!
I hope I’ve challenged some of the pre-conceptions you might have come here with tonight and got you thinking about how Bing can fit into your marketing strategies and what else you can do to help support a free and open web.
In the same way that we got people to use Chrome and other Google products, we can get them to switch to Bing (and Firefox while you're at it).
The more people we get to switch, the more people we can advertise to and bit by bit, the more diverse and better we can make the Internet
