The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

On Sunday, Microsoft unveiled Bing - its re-designed, and re-branded search engine. It was only 2006 when Microsoft released the Live search engine, which replaced MSN Search with a new name and look, but pretty much the same features for both users and advertisers.  It was at this time that Microsoft changed the name of their ad interface to Microsoft adCenter.  The Live.com brand didn't even stick around long enough to displace the old MSN brand name in common parlance (across all the posts in this Blog, I count roughly five times as many mentions of "MSN" as of "Live", which is fairly typical).  
 
Bing is a much more significant departure from the classic search experience.  As Microsoft attempts to gain back a bit of market share from Google, it has launched Bing to offer many exciting new features that Google does not.  As a search engine user, I encourage you to go check it out and decide for yourself how you like the new experience.  But what I will address here is what Bing means for online advertisers like us.
 
The Transition
If you advertise with MSN - I mean - Microsoft adCenter, your ads are already appearing on Bing right now.  This happened automatically.  Overnight, Microsoft flipped the switch, and all Microsoft search, both paid and organic, began occurring on Bing.com.  By all reports, the transition was seamless, and caused no lapse in ad delivery.  Your adCenter reports will make no distinction between activity on Live and activity on Bing.
 
How Will Bing Affect the Look of Your Ads?
The style, format, and layout of typical ads in Bing is no different than it was on Live (or Google for that matter).  Your ads still have blue 25-character titles, two 35-character black description lines, and a 35-character green display URL.  Words from the user's search that appear in your ad are bolded.   
 
The page overall has some minor layout differences.  Specifically, Bing borrows a page from Ask.com's playbook by displaying related searches in the left sidebar.  Below these, Bing displays users' recent search history, in case they'd like to search for something again.  Also of note are several toggles that allow users to narrow their search based on geography (general, national, local) and media type (video, image, music, regular page, etc.).   
 
If you mostly advertise on a local scale, you may notice a boost to your traffic since the launch of Bing, as it does a very nice job of funneling local searches into local sponsored results.

How Will Bing Affect the Volume of Users?
Microsoft has invested a great deal into this project to try and do search right, and win back market share from Google.  This starts with building an innovative search engine, but the real work is in the marketing plan.  You can expect a very aggressive and well-funded ad campaign for Bing. You may have already seen their TV spots.  Also, this high-profile product release is sure to attract a lot of curious searchers.  This will certainly drive up traffic temporarily.  If you are reading this blog post, you'll probably go and check out Bing yourself (if you haven't yet), and do a couple of searches that will count towards some advertiser's impression numbers.  The question for Microsoft - and for advertisers - is whether Bing will deliver consistent long-term inventory growth for Microsoft's search business.
 
How Will Bing Affect Clickthrough and Conversion Rates?
Here is where I think Bing is interesting.  One of the most unique and intriguing features of Bing is that when users mouse-over the right side of a search listing, a yellow circle appears. When they mouse-over that circle more closely, a text preview of the first bit of text on the site pops up, along with a list of internal links to other pages within that site.  What is interesting about this, is that it makes the right side of the search-results page a much more active and vibrant part of the organic search results.  These preview boxes may attract more clicks to the sponsored search listings that live beside it.
 
Microsoft has also taken some new measures to make their organic search listings more relevant. For example, in organic search results, pages with awkward or irrelevant page titles get assigned a different title for listing purposes - usually matching the user's query.  In essence, Microsoft is doing dynamic keyword insertion into organic listings.  If they can increase overall confidence in the value of their search results, both paid and organic, then clickthrough rates and conversion rates should both climb.
 
If you are an adCenter advertiser, it's important to remember that for the most part, Bing will still offer the same set of users, searching for the same keywords. The only differences for them will be the front-end design, and a few clever new features, so we should probably not expect the release of Bing to be a game-changer.  How this pans out in the long run, in terms of the performance of online ad campaign remains to be seen.

Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

Bing is showing PPC ads from overture (yahoo company. Why Bing is showing overture Ads when their contract had expired in 2006.

Why they are not using there own Microsoft Ad-center

Any comments??

Puneet

mr.puneetbhatia@gmail.com

Inspired by Fred Wilson and our own Clickable SEM Guru Ehren , the team at Clickable decided to test