Google AdWords has long championed top spot when it comes to internet marketing strategies like PPC (pay per click). MSN ha released their own version of AdWords, called Bing Ads, which many people will tell you is not only just as good as Google AdWords, but even better.
Some Of The Obvious Benefits Of Bing Ads
Given that Google AdWords has been around for so long, and since it is the number one PPC advertising platform, almost everyone who has an advertising campaign is on there. Everyone has their hand in that PPC and keyword cookie jar, making the competition far more fierce than the smaller and lesser known competitor, Bing Ads.
Since Google AdWords is so popular and has reigned supreme in the world of internet marketing, they have also been able to charge whatever price they want for advertisements. In order to be more appealing and attract visitors, Bing Ads offers lower pricing in almost every area. Given that Bing is the second most popular search engine after Google, it’s well worth it to start up an Bing Ads PPC campaign there as well.
Now for the last and final benefit: Bing Ads is far less strict than AdWords. As anyone whose been locked out of AdWords will tell you, once you’re out of Google AdWords, you’re out for good. There’s a better chance that you’ll be able to post ads through Bing Ads on a number of different sites with different content.
NOTE: If you ever have any problems in having your advertisements display with Bing Ads, they are renowned to have superb customer support that will tell you exactly why your ads aren’t appearing. Most people then have their advertisements up and running within 24 hours.
Google AdWords Benefits Rebuffed
So you have people out there who are diehard fans of Google AdWords. Why? Mostly because it’s what they know. But there are a lot of common benefits to Google AdWords that you can easily rebuff with Bing Ads. Let’s start with the first argument:
“Google AdWords drives more traffic!”
For the most part, sure. Of course it would. When you compare the amount of people who use the Google search engine over Bing, you can clearly see why Google AdWords would get more traffic to your site.
But here’s the thing: the traffic you get is not always the traffic you want. The question you have to ask yourself here is “quality or quantity?” and each internet marketing platform offers different things. For the most part, Google AdWords will bring you the quantity, but it’s Bing Ads that will bring you the quality.
The quality of the traffic that you’re getting is important. You are paying for every click, as is the nature a PPC marketing campaign, so you really want to optimize your return on investment, or ROI. Bing Ads not only gives you higher quality and better targeted traffic to your advertisements, but you pay less for each click. Google AdWords, on the other hand, charges you a lot more per click and a lot more of the clicks you get are useless.
“Google has far better customer service.”
Do they now? Not to say that Google’s customer service is awful – it isn’t – but if you have contacted Bing Ads about your ads not showing up, you’ll get a direct answer to the problem and get an immediate solution. A lot of the Google customer service representatives, on the other hand, will try to “troubleshoot” the issue and then perhaps create a “ticket.” You’ll get a solution within 24 to 72 hours, but MSN customer service tends to be quicker and more effective.
“Google’s prices are fair for what you get.”
If what you mean by this are a whole lot of clicks with very little action, then sure. You may think that the prices are fair. But as mentioned above, often the vast amount of clicks that you get through Google go nowhere. You pay for an advertising campaign that isn’t even paying off. It’s things like this which drive people away from PPC marketing campaigns.
Google also has some arguably sketchy pricing terms, like smart pricing, which actually isn’t really all that smart for most users and will cause you to lose money rather than save money. Also, for the same niche that you can find on Bing Ads, you can easily pay twice as much (if not more) with Google AdWords.
What Google AdWords Does Well
One of the main pain points to Bing Ads is that it doesn’t offer a whole lot in the way of different languages. While Google AdWords boasts over 40 different languages for you to use for campaign targeting, Bing Ads only has six language options. These are:
- English (Canada)
- English (UK)
- English (Singapore)
- English and Spanish (USA)
- French (Canada)
- French (France)
A common complaint with Bing Ads is that you can’t group languages together, so depending on what someone’s browser settings may be, they may not be able to read your advertisements in different languages.
The other major drawback to Bing Ads is that it offers far less target locations when compared to Google. Google offers a vast array of targeting options, such as:
- Searching by country, territories, cities and regions
- Choosing a point on a map and then setting a target market radius around that
- Selecting a pre-determined lot of locations
- Exclude selected areas
- Target a custom shape
So what’s the final conclusion here? A successful pay per click marketing campaign can be run with either AdWords or Bing Ads. AdWords is more strict and more expensive but it will bring in the traffic and it has numerous advertising options. Bing Ads, on the other hand, has a far higher conversion rate per click, is less expensive, and has better customer support.
The best advice we can give is to start with one, and then to try out the other if one is either too expensive or just isn’t delivering and giving you the results that you need.