10 Features Unique To Bing Ads That You Might Not Know About

On the Bing Ads blog this week Marta Turek from Mediative spotlighted several features offered in Bing Ads that are not available in Google AdWords. Most PPC practitioners spend more time in AdWords than Bing Ads, so it can be hard to keep up with the different features offered in Bing Ads.

AdWords users will be familiar with the fact that there is essentially zero visibility into Google search partner performance beyond aggregated metrics. Turek, who shared her AdWords geo-targeting case study with us recently, highlights three features she uses as a result of Bing Ad’s transparency into the Bing and Yahoo search partner network.

1. Bing Ads offers reporting on individual search partner performance. You’ll find this in the Bing Ads UI under Reports > Standard Performance > Performance > Website URL (publisher)

2. There is the ability to exclude search partners from both the ad group and campaign levels. To do this, check the box next to the campaigns or ad groups you want to add exclusions, and click “Make Bulk Changes” in the sub-navigation. From there, select “Website exclusions” from the drop down and add up to 500 sites you want to exclude (you’ll want to have the list in a format where you can just copy and paste it).

3. Bing Ads offers the ability to target just search partners at the ad group level. To adjust the targeting options, click on an ad group and select Settings. You’ll find Ad distribution listed under the Advanced Settings section.

The other features unique to Bing Ads that Turek highlights are:

• More flexibility in setting cookie windows based on your own sales cycle vs. AdWords 30-day option
• Trended quality score reporting
• Negative keyword conflict report
• Geographic, day parting and ad rotation settings at the ad group level
• Time zone settings at the campaign level
• Control over device targeting

Turek listed nine unique features of Bing Ads, but I’ll add that inviting outside search marketing practitioners to guest blog is another. The Bing Ads blog has guest posts going back as far as 2009 (when Microsoft changed the search engine’s brand name from MSN to Bing). This year’s guest bloggers have included from Ian Harris of Search Laboratory, Bryant Garvin who also wrote about Bing search partners, John Whipple from BoostCTR, Melissa Zeiger from HP and John Rampton from Maple North. (To find them easily, search “guest blogger” on the Bing Ads blog.)

Google’s Inside AdWords blog has featured a guest post from analytics guru Avinash Kaushik  in 2011 and one from Matt Mierzewski and Jen Syverud from RKG in January of 2012 on dynamic search ads.