Bing Places For Business is proving to be a valuable and in this guide, we look at how local business owners and marketers can use the platform and help potential customers to discover their businesses.

What is Bing Places for Business?

Bing Places for Business is a Bing portal for local business owners to list their businesses on the search engine. Launched in 2013, Bing Places shares many similarities with Google My Business as a directory of businesses for users to find a range of enterprises in their local area.

Bing Places For Business listings that appears in two places:

• Bing search results
• Bing Maps

Every listing contains includes the name of the business, its physical address, its phone number, website URL, and opening hours. Bing Places also lets you manage your listing online or via an app, upload images, share offers, and link to social media profiles.

How to get started

Getting started with Bing Places For Business is a three-step process.

1. Visit the Bing Places for Business website and click New user to get started or claim your business. If you already have an account, select Existing user and log in.
2. For new users, you have a choice of clicking Import from Google My Business now or Claim or add your business manually. If you’re importing from Google My Business, you can follow this guide from Bright Local. We’ll look at how to claim or add a business for these instructions.
3. Under What is your business type?, select your business type
4. Select your Country/region and enter your Business / Professional name and Location to see if Bing already has your details. If it can’t find you, you can either modify your search or click Create my business.
5. Log in with your details
6. Enter your business details and click Next to continue
7. Specify your location and click Submit
8. Choose your business category and write a description
9. You can choose to show or hide your full business address. If you don’t have a business address, select No and click Next.
10. Enter your contact and social media details (if you have any)
11. Add photos of your business to your listing. Click Browse to search through your images and upload them.
12. Set your working hours (if you have any) or click Skip.
13. Finally, verify your listing. You can verify the listing immediately or at a later date. Verification options include phone, SMS/text, email, and post.
14. After verification, your listing will go through a 7-14 day publishing cycle and become visible on Bing Maps and Bing’s local SERPs.

Advantages and disadvantages of Bing Places

With many similarities to Google My Business, Bing Places For Business Gives you the chance to achieve greater visibility and increase the traffic to your business, whether online or in a physical location. Here are some of the pros and cons:

Advantages

The Search Entity API

Microsoft believes in Bing Places and its Search Entity API brings “rich contextual information about people, places, things, and local businesses to any application, blog, or website for a more engaging user experience.” Having access to an API opens up a range of possibilities for faster and more sophisticated local SEO strategies.

Visual search

Bing’s Visual Search has helped to improve its advertising options, allowing users to conduct searches based on images taken on smartphones. Visual Search then tries to find similar images, products, pages that include an image, and even recipes, based on your snapped photo. If your Bing Places images can match their’s, you’re on your way to a potential conversion.

Bing’s open source nature

In 2019, Microsoft added its Space Partition Tree And Graph (SPTAG) algorithm to GitHub. Bing’s search algorithm also works in different ways to Google, notably:

• Using click signals to improve accuracy of SERP listings
• Favouring the authority of older websites and content compared to newer sites
• Preferring sites with more qualitative backlinks and less focus on the quantity
• For online forums, Bing cites popularity and authority as trust signals as well as the quality of moderation

In terms of Bing Places for Business, this favours SEOs who like the technical side of their work. Integration with programming languages can provide ways to automate and streamline processes and gain an edge in local SEO for businesses with increased site visibility as well as local ads.

Read our article for more on the differences between Bing and Google.

Disadvantages

Less market share

Google dominates the search engine industry. Bing’s market share between June 2019 and June 2020 was 2.75% compared to Google’s 91.75%. Using Bing means you’re targeting less customers and could be missing out on revenue.

Bing’s search algorithm

While Bing’s search algorithm has unique quirks, it’s not as advanced as Google’s. Notably, Bing takes keyword density and H1 and H2 tag content into account, things Google left behind long ago. So optimisation for Bing isn’t the same as it is for Google so mixing the two could harm your rankings on Google.

Is Bing Places good for SEO?

People associate online business directories with bad SEO and black hat tactics. While that may have been the case before, services like Bing Places are highly beneficial for SEO.

Bing’s local SEO algorithm prioritises distance, relevance, and popularity and Bing has said that detailed business information “helps the Local ranking algorithm to accurately match your business listing to user searches.”

Further resources

• Why Local Services Ads Are Great For Small Businesses
• 8 Local Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bing
• Which is more effective for local SEO, Google My Business or Bing Places?
• Mastering the Bing Places Dashboard and Business Listing in 2020
• Bing vs. Google: A Comparison

Conclusion

Bing Places For Business is an emerging power in the area of local SEO. It has some clear advantages over Google My Business, such as differences in listing management, lower competition, and a customer base offering higher conversion rates.

While Google My Business still enjoys the lion’s share of the market and benefits from its status as the default mobile search engine – Bing Places For Business can work in tandem with Google My Business for better overall results.

That’s a question many advertisers ask themselves when faced with a new campaign. But with so many options, it can be difficult to choose the right one.

In this article, I will look at each bidding strategy and what they offer.

What is a bidding strategy?

A bidding strategy is a campaign with a specific focus, dependent on a two primary criteria:

• The networks your campaigns are targeting (Display or Search)
• Your focus: clicks, impressions, conversions or views

The idea behind these strategies is that they help you to accomplish specific goals depending on what your target audience is. You can use them to get a higher click rate, making a better impression, or increasing your conversions. There are a variety of different bidding strategies available for you to use, and it’s important that you understand all of your options so that you can choose the one that’s best for you.

Read: Your Online Advertising Jargon Buster

Different types of bidding strategies

1. Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

If you want to optimize your conversions, then this could be the solution for you. This type of strategy will focus on trying to create more conversions at a specific acquisition cost.

Google Ads will automatically set your bids based on your average CPA. If you don’t know your acquisition costs, then this could be a problem. Your CPA is the amount of money that you can afford to spend on one customer.

2. Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)

Google Ads will set your bids to maximize conversion value based on the return that you are looking for from your ad spend. It involves a bit of maths to work out, but if you can get there, then it can be quite helpful.

You calculate a Target ROAS like so:

(Sales ÷ ad spend) x 100

You can even use previous campaigns to help you decide what your percentage should be if you aren’t sure.

3. Target Impression Share Bidding

Target Impression Share Bidding is one of the newer bidding strategies around. It replaced Target Search Page Location and Target Outranking Share in June 2019. Advertisers set a goal impression share percentage, like the way you would for a target CPA. You get three choices for ad placements:

• Absolute top of the page
• Top of the page
• Anywhere on the page

Google will then adjust your bids following this.

Note: Impression Share only includes the Google Search Network.

4. Maximize Clicks

Maximizing Clicks is an automated strategy that sets your bids to get as many clicks as it can within your specified budget. It’s arguably the simplest way to gain clicks, as Google Ads does most of the work. What’s more, you don’t need to set bid amounts for your ad groups, keywords or placements.

5. Manual CPC Bidding

If you’d prefer to do things manually, there’s Manual CPC Bidding. This strategy allows you to set your own maximum CPC. If you use this type of bidding, you get complete control over all of your bids, and you can set the maximum amount that you could pay for each click on any of your ads. It gives you a level of control that you can’t get through automated systems.

6. Enhanced Cost Per Click (ECPC)

Enhanced CPC is a partially automated bidding strategy that works by automatically adjusting your bids. The strategy is based on clicks and their probability of leading to a sale or conversion. ECPC tries to keep your average CPC below the max that you have set, and it works best when coupled with conversion tracking.

7. CPM Bidding (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

This type of bidding is based solely on impressions. YouTube campaigns like TrueView and Display Network are the only things that this option can help. You can’t use it on a Search Network as it is a display only bid strategy.

8. vCPM Bidding (Cost Per Viewable Thousand Impressions)

Like the option above, this is a manual display-only bid strategy. It is there to let advertisers bid for impressions when your ad is triggered. If you are trying to expand your brand and you want people to know your message, this is an excellent choice based on viewability. Google will aim to maximize the number of viewable impressions your ad receives, which works best with a finite audience.

Viewable CPM bidding (vCPM) means only paying for ads when they’re seen. While CPM bids get converted to vCPM automatically, it’s recommended to manually update bids. For more info, check out Google Ads help page on vCPM.

9. CPV Bidding (Cost Per View)

You will pay for video views and other video interactions when you use this type of bid. It is the way that many people set the amount that you will end up paying for your TrueView video ads. CPV Bidding covers any clicks on call to actions that take them straight to your business website.

To do this, you enter the maximum that you want to pay per view for your ad group in a video campaign. The max bid then applies to all ads in the group.

Further resources

• Bidding Strategy Types (Google Ads API)
• AdWords Target CPA Bidding: A Case Study
• How to Use Portfolio Smart Bidding Strategies in Google Ads
• Case Study: Utilizing Google Ads Smart Bidding Problem

Summary

As you can see, there are so many bidding strategies that you can use to enhance your marketing in some way. Each strategy has its pros and cons, so it is going to depend on what you are hoping to achieve as to which bidding strategy you should choose.

Take your time and look through all of the options to give yourself the best chance of success. These only work well when they are evaluated and chosen wisely. Bidding strategies are not a one size fits all solution, so make sure you are checking on them frequently to ensure they are still accomplishing what you set out.

In this article, I will look at what CRO is and the best metrics to track and analyse your conversion rate.

What is conversion rate optimisation (CRO)?

Conversion rate optimisation is the process of increasing the number of site visitors who you want to take an action (which would result in a conversion). This can include:

• Signing up to a newsletter
• Creating an account
• Completing a form
• Downloading a white paper
• Making a purchase

Much like SEO, CRO is an optimisation process and requires constant improvements and maintenance. You need to understand the user experience (UX) of your website, the actions that visitors take, and what might be stopping them from converting.

Have you been using Google Analytics for your CRO?

Google Analytics is one of the most important CRO tools out there and if you’ve been using it, you will know how essential it is for CRO-related analytics. Insights from the platform can go a long way to helping you find areas for optimisation and split testing and with a basic knowledge of analytics, you can find great opportunities.

Top CRO analytics to track

But what do those opportunities look like? Here are 6 CRO analytics you can monitor and use in your optimisation efforts.

1. Conversions by Browser & OS

Not all browsers and operating systems are built the same; the experience on Windows 10 using Microsoft Edge is very different to someone using Safari on macOS Catalina, for example. That’s why the Technology reports in Google Analytics are a hotbed for CRO insights.

In the Browser & OS report you can find the following data categories (which you can set as Dimensions):

• Browser
• Operating System
• Screen Resolution
• Screen Colors
• Flash Version
• Java Support

Why this is important: When it comes to browsers, are there any that convert lower than the rest of them on your site? If you find that is the case, then you can click on that specific browser to see the different versions. Then you will be able to see if there are some versions that are particularly hindering the conversion rate.

How to track in Google Analytics: You can produce a report for this by going to the Audience > Technology > Browser & OS. Set your date range and look to the third set of columns under the heading, Conversions.

Note: Make sure you’ve set up conversion goals!

2. Mobile conversions

You might find that there is a particular mobile device that represents a large percentage of your website traffic. But if there is a bug in that mobile system, then it means that you’re losing a big opportunity. It could also be worth seeing if there are any differences between smartphones and tablets, and compare to desktop. If you find that there are some discrepancies, then you know where to look next.

Why this is important: The most common mobile devices you’re likely to find are iPhones, Samsung Galaxy’s, and Pixel phones. But only optimising for these is alienating a large pool of potential customers. 72.6% of smartphones worldwide use Android compared to 26.72% using iOS (as of May 2020). As there are millions of different Android devices around the world, you need to take them into consideration. You can’t optimise for all of them of course but completely ignoring them isn’t advisable either.

How to track in Google Analytics: You can produce a report for this by going to the Audience > Technology > Mobile > Devices. This gives you a list of known mobile devices that have been used to access your site. Set your date range as normal and check the Conversions section against other metrics.

3. Site speed

There will be a much better user experience if you have a site that loads quickly. The longer people stay on your site the more likely they’ll convert. The general rule is to aim for 3 seconds or less to avoid the risk of visitors becoming bouncers.

If you are interested in the user experience, then you need to care about the speed of your site. Check if there are any browsers that have slow load times, and then you can go from there.

Why this is important: Site speed is not only a UX necessity but it’s also a ranking factor (according to the mercurial John Mueller). It’s also linked to revenue—a 2017 study by Akamai showed that “a 100-millisecond delay in website load time could hurt conversion rates by 7%”. A slow site costs you money in the long run.

How to track in Google Analytics: You can produce a report for this by going to the Behaviour > Site Speed. From there, you can check an overview of your site speed data, analyse Page Timings, Speed Suggestions, and User Timings.

4. Site Search

Site search is an underrated tool for CRO. It cuts out the middle man of navigating through a site to find something. It’s either there or it isn’t and that’s down to the efficacy of your copy, internal linking, and general site architecture. Using data analysis, you can see behavioural aspects of your site searchers compared to the visitors that don’t search, and then use that to your advantage. 

Why this is important: According to a study by Screen Pages, visitors who used internal site search contributed to 13.8% of the revenues generated. It can also give you content ideas. If you have an e-commerce site and someone searches for something that generates a 404 page (meaning there wasn’t a page the matched their search), you might need to create that page and meet the demand.

How to track in Google Analytics: This can be found by navigating to Behaviour > Site Search. From there, you can get an overview, analyse Usage, Search Terms and Search Pages.

5. Traffic by Hour of the Day

People search at different times. The assumption is traffic is highest after 5pm on a weekday in your local area but that’s not the case for all sites. Viewing your site data by time can give you quite a variety of insights. This can be about what site visitors are buying at certain times and what they are searching for at certain times. Not only that, but you can also compare it to marketing campaigns, and the times and days that offers and promotions went out.

Why this is important: When is the best time to release a special offer to customers to generate the most revenue and gain the most traffic? It’s not going to be same for all sites and the only way to know is with an analytics report. You also need the data to plan for potential server overloads. If everyone accesses your site at the same time, it will cause slower speeds for other customers, lose money, traffic, and potential repeat custom.

How to track in Google Analytics: To find site traffic, navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic. From there, you can check the Channels tab, Tree Maps, Source/Medium, and Referrals. For each one, you can analyse your data by Day, Week, and Month. But for hourly data, you can find this under Behaviour > Overview.

6. Behaviour funnel

If your site has a lot of content, then you need to think about what the content does to help, or possibly hinder, conversion. You might find that some content brings in more conversions than others, whereas others that get a lot of traffic don’t convert. Then you can see what pages of content have the biggest business value.

Why this is important: To build the best funnel, you need to know how site visitors behave and navigate your site. A funnel analysis, for example, can show the exit rates on landing pages and if they’re particularly high, a place for necessary optimisation.

How to track in Google Analytics: You can set up Funnel Visualisation in Google Analytics by going to Conversions > Funnel Visualisation. Then you need to set up your goals. You can also analyse your Multi-Channel Funnels from the same section to see how your marketing strategy is working together to create conversions.

Conclusion

Using web analytics is essential for CRO.

But it’s also important to remember what CRO entails. It requires user data research to draw logical conclusions and form better lead gen strategies. The combination of Google Analytics can give insights into your target market, user behaviour and the potential to improve your site structure if necessary.

And never forget to set your goals and keep in mind the CUTE model:

• Clarity – make your site clear to understand for all users
• Urgency – site visitors want results immediately—it’s your job to give them that to the best of your ability
• Trust – offer users security and trust when they use your product or service
• Evidence – before you make a change to your site, ensure you have social proof that this is necessary

Keep it CUTE and let CRO lead the way to more sales and conversion.

ROAS stands for “return on ad spend” and measures how much revenue you make based on the amount you spend on advertising.

How to calculate ROAS

Calculating your return on ad spend for any given marketing or advertising campaign is straightforward. Here’s an example:

This metric can help to increase your profit margin, as you can determine which advertising methods are proving to be the most beneficial for your business.

If you’re familiar with the concept of ROI (return on investment), you may be thinking that ROAS is very similar. However, it’s important to understand ROI is general metric while ROAS focuses on ad spend only.

Relationship with other metrics

ROAS can also tie in with CPL (cost per lead) and CPA (cost per acquisition). While CPL and CPA help you to budget your marketing campaigns and can give you an aim of reducing the costs of leads and acquisition (therefore reduce the outgoings in your marketing campaigns), ROAS can help you to determine whether it’s actually worth investing in these leads and this acquisition in the first place and whether you should continue focusing on these areas – no matter how cheap they may be.

What is a “good” ROAS?

Much like a good Google Ads CTR, there isn’t a definitive answer. The example above is regarded as a common benchmark (400% or 4:1). Your criteria to determine a good ROAS depends on things like:

• A need for higher returns to maintain financial stability
• The goals and targets you set (e.g. if you’re focused on growth or brand awareness, ad spend might be higher)

Some businesses require a ROAS of 10:1 in order to stay profitable, while others can grow substantially at just 3:1. A business can only gauge its ROAS goal when it has a defined budget and firm handle on its profit margins. A large margin means that the business can survive a low ROAS; smaller margins are an indication the business must maintain low advertising costs. An e-commerce store in this situation must achieve a relatively high ROAS to reach profitability.

How to improve your ROAS

There are a number of ways to improve your return on ad spend when using Google Ads. Here are a few to consider:

1. Adjust bids based on devices

When using Google Ads, you can set different bids for mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Desktop tends to be default, but if you know your users are more likely to make purchases when shopping on their tablet or smartphone, you may want to adjust your bids for these devices. Generally speaking, however, people tend to use smartphones to browse rather than buy, so you may want to reduce your bids for smartphones.

2. Adjust bids based on time and location

Again, consumers tend to share similar behaviour in purchasing less through the night – as many are asleep – or through certain hours of the day – when many will be at work. You may want to reduce your bids during these times, as they’re less likely to convert to sales. This can improve your ROAS.

3. Add a branded campaign

Branded campaigns can drastically improve your ROAS. It has been founded that branded ad campaigns can get between twice and four times the return on ad spend as non-branded campaigns. Now, many marketing managers will say that it’s a waste of money bidding on your own brand name, as customers searching for it are likely to complete a purchase without your paid advertising anyway. But this comes with a risk. If you don’t bid on your own name, competitors are likely to and could swoop in and take your sale from under your nose. Bidding on your own name gives you more control over what customers see when they search for your name.

4. Add negative keywords

Adding negative keywords may sound odd, as a negative keyword is actually a word that prevents your ad from showing up in search results. But it can help to reduce your ad spend on areas you don’t want to spend on and improve your overall ROAS. If you’re advertising dog food and someone searches “what is the worst dog food” your ad could match the key terms “dog food” and show up. By adding “worst” to your negative keywords, you could prevent your ad from showing up in that search and you won’t have to pay for it showing up in that search.

Is ROAS better than CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)?

ROAS and CPA are two of the most commonly used and popular key performance indicators (KPIs) for ad campaigns. But which could prove better for your business? Well, the answer depends on your business and its aims.

CPA is great if you have a fixed cost payout model, which makes it ideal for lead generation. However, if you’re working in the realm of e-commerce, it may not be ideal for you.

In a similar vein, ROAS is great for businesses operating within the realm of e-commerce that may have revenue that varies greatly between purchases (for example, in an e-commerce store, some users will purchase just one item, while others may fill their cart and check out a haul).

Conclusion

ROAS is an area that every business needs to focus on and improve.

It’s a great means of determining the efficacy of any marketing or advertising campaign you’re running and can ensure that your business is only engaging with and investing in activities that are proving profitable for the company and worth the time, effort and money that is being poured into them.

Fast forward 8 years – and another name change – and Microsoft Advertising remains the strongest competitor to Google Ads in terms of paid search. This is thanks to the similar features and that differ in areas that benefit certain demographics and users.

But how effective is Microsoft Ads compared to Google Ads? Google Ads is the bigger name with the furthest reach, but what about the benefits of using Microsoft Ads with its cheaper CPC and high performance for affluent demographics?

Let’s run through the benefits and challenges with using Microsoft Ads over Google Ads and why it might be more effective to use both together in a PPC campaign.

Read: Google Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Is Best?

Is it Bing Ads or Microsoft Ads?

Firstly, it’s important to note that there’s a lot of articles that reference Bing Ads. On 30th April 2019, Bing Ads re-branded as Microsoft Advertising (or Microsoft Ads for short). Where some of the confusion lies is with the name of the search engine.

The search engine is still called Bing but the paid advertising service is called Microsoft Ads.

Advantages of using Microsoft Ads

When it comes to PPC advertising, the first platform that springs to mind is often Google Ads. But there are so many PPC platforms out there with their own unique benefits and one of the best Google Ads alternatives is Microsoft Ads.

Here are some of the main benefits to using the platform.

Cost

Depending on your budget, using Microsoft Ads can be more cost-effective than Google Ads. This is because of its cheaper CPC (cost-per-click). Figures vary but CPCs can differ anywhere from 32.5% to 60.2% less than Google Ads. If you’re on a tight budget, you have to be meticulous with your bid management so Microsoft Ads might be the solution.

Less competition

Generally, Microsoft faces less competition on its keywords. This helps lower your CPC (cost-per-click), which means you’re paying less to target a demographic with more disposable income. According to TheeDigital, campaigns on Microsoft Advertising face approximately 36% less competition than Google Ads.

Market share

When it comes to search, Google rules the roost. But Microsoft Search Network makes the most of its smaller market share (the following data is courtesy of Comscore qSearch from December 2019, global desktop traffic only):

• 12.2 billion monthly desktop searches
• 592 million unique desktop users
• 11.5% desktop market share

This is a huge opportunity for niche advertisers when combined with smaller competition and lower CPCs on Microsoft Ads.

Target audiences

Microsoft Ads leverages the power of Bing search, as Google Ads does with Google. But their target audiences differ. For Bing, nearly 75% of users are over the age of 35 and around 50% have an income of $75,000 or more. For sellers of luxury items, this is perfect.

Bing users have a higher income and they spend it too – on average, Bing users spend 22% more on purchases than any other search engine.

Microsoft Ads also has a form of audience targeting called In-market Audiences that uses customer lists containing users ready to buy based on purchase intent and where they’ve clicked on Bing. Using these kinds of features can have a major effect on the success of a PPC campaign, as Australian online marketplace MyDeal found out. By using In-market Audiences, they saw a 389% YoY (year-on-year) rise in conversions.

Device targeting

Microsoft Ads has the advantage over Google Ads when it comes to device targeting. Bing allows a company to target a consumer based on the specific device they’re using, as well as the OS installed on it. Similarly, Microsoft Ads target mobile users specifically and allow advertisers the ability to discount desktop viewers altogether.

Compatibility with Google Ads

As they say “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” – Microsoft Ads lets you import an existing Google Ads campaign into its platform in a matter of clicks. That saves you having to manually recreate a successful campaign.

Remarketing produces higher conversion rates

In a Microsoft case study, remarketing was recommended for a campaign for short-term loan company, Lending Stream. The idea was to retarget users who had engaged with their site before and get them to return and convert. The result was a conversion rate increase by 80% and a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) decrease of 77%.

Disadvantages of using Microsoft Ads

Reach

Of course, one of the main drawbacks of using Microsoft Ads is their limited reach, compared to Google Ads. Google has more of a dominant position over the online advertising market – indeed, they control at least 93% of the search market – and most businesses will look to use Google Ads because of its popularity, regardless of its success or failure.

However, Microsoft Ads can reach a good portion of online users too, and simply choosing to not make use of Bing ads can be a bad idea. Over 5 billion searches per month are conducted via Bing, and at least 63 million people in Bing’s user base aren’t reached by Google Ads.

Market share

I addressed the advantages of Microsoft’s market share but in terms of search engine market share, Bing only holds 2.61% compared to Google’s 92.06% (as of May 2020). The gap widens on mobile where 53% of paid-search clicks take place.

While Bing’s market share doesn’t necessarily affect the performance of a Microsoft Ads campaign, it’s worth knowing for larger advertisers with growth-aligned goals.

ROI (return on investment)

By ROI, I refer to your return on investment to Google Ads as an advertising platform. According to Google, it “conservatively estimated” that for every $1 a business spent on Google Ads, they received $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.

That’s an 800% ROI just from using Google Ads.

No Customer Match (yet)

Although Customer Match is in the pipeline for Microsoft Ads, it’s still a specific feature to Google Ads and allows advertisers to create and target customers from specific customer lists.

They can do this by uploading contact details like email addresses, and target customers on all of Google’s different networks including Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail.

No Smart Shopping campaigns

Another Google-specific feature, Smart Shopping combines Shopping Ads with display remarketing to automate the bidding process and ad placement to promote products and services across multiple networks.

What’s more, because it uses remarketing audiences, you’re more likely to convert as visitors have already interacted with your site.

Resources

Microsoft Ads

• 3 Reasons Why Your Google & Microsoft Ads Aren’t Converting And How To Fix Them
• 5 of The Best Microsoft Ads Experts in 2020
• Use Microsoft Advertising recommendations to enhance your campaigns
• Don’t forget Microsoft Ads! Why other search engines are important for PPC strategies
• Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies
• Microsoft Ads – Budget and Bid Strategies

Google Ads

• Smart Bidding: A Google Ads Guide
• Importance of Google Ads Structure
• A Guide To Google Ads Remarketing
• How To Make Automated Changes With Google Ads Scripts
• What Is Search Excellence And How To Achieve It With Google Ads
• 10 of the Best Google Ads Tools and Software For 2020

Should you use Microsoft Ads, Google Ads, or both?

You can choose to use one or the other but what about combining the efforts of Microsoft and Google together? After all, Microsoft Ads lets you import a Google Ads campaign, so the opportunity is already there. Combining the two can only increase the effectiveness of Microsoft Ads and Google Ads.

The two biggest PPC ad networks in the world have their own niches and benefits, so it makes sense to use them together if it makes sense to your vertical. And, if you start off with Google Ads alone and then change your mind, you can import your Google ads campaign over to Microsoft Ads.

There is a challenge with using both: how are you going to manage two types of ad accounts? Fortunately, Adzooma has a solution. Our online advertising platform allows you to manage both Microsoft and Google Ads accounts under one management screen so you never have to swap between platforms.

All the important aspects of your PPC management is automated, leaving you with the tasks that need a human touch.

Interested in knowing more? Head to our Features page to see what more Adzooma can offer you today.

However, despite PPC advertising being a great way of achieving long term growth and revenue, it’s only successful if your ROI (return on investment) and budgeting are managed efficiently. It’s also important that the right PPC management tools are used.

So this guide will show you how to budget for your PPC campaigns the smart way.

What is PPC budgeting?

When starting a PPC campaign, the first thing to look at is your budget. A PPC budget is the amount of money that you want to spend on online advertising, whether that’s to boost brand awareness, increase sales, email sign-ups, or any other acquisition efforts.

But how do you do this?

Well, the method that you take to create your PPC budget depends on several factors

• Your location
• Cost-per-click (CPC)
• Conversion rate
• Lead quality
• Visitor frequency

A good strategy to start with is the SMART goals model.

SMART goals

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely and each part acts as a stage for achieving goals. They provide a clear road map for your campaign and align with your priorities and capabilities.

An example of a SMART PPC goal could be achieving a 15% increase in revenue in the next 12 months. Using SMART could look like this:

• Specific – the goal: a 15% increase in revenue in the next 12 months through PPC campaigns.
• Measurable – the percentage increase your business sees each month (when looking into the above example this would be 1.8%). This should be measurable by a pre-agreed standard.
• Attainable – perhaps the most important part, this will involve you factoring in your business’ past performance, profitability requirements, changes within your infrastructure, the current economy and any other elements could affect your PPC goals. By creating attainable goals, you’ll have a measurable standard of results to work with.
• Realistic – your goals for your PPC campaigns should also be realistic. For example, if you’re a smaller business, you need to know that your campaigns might not bring in as much profit as that of a large organisation with a higher ad spend and brand following.
• Timely – this is when you expect your goal to be achieved. In the above case, it’s 12 months.

Why is budgeting so important in PPC?

Whether you’re a small business or a larger enterprise, it’s vital that you set a budget for every PPC campaign you run. Why? Because without a clear budget, you’ll spend far more than you should and won’t be able to calculate your cost-per-conversion.

That means less profit and a significant dent in your finances.

Budget mismanagement can cause serious financial ramifications outside of advertising so keep a lid on your spending and know where your money is going.

Approaches to budget management

Each business will take a different approach when it comes to managing their PPC budget. However, it’s a good idea to utilise a PPC budget calculator and management software in order to determine how effective the campaign has been.

In terms of PPC metrics, you should pay attention to the following (keeping in mind your ad spend and your overall goals):

• Cost-per-click (CPC)
• Setting a minimum number of clicks per day
• The value per conversion
• Your competition
• The maximum weekly/monthly/yearly spend
• Maximum bid per click

70/20/10

Another effective way of managing your budget is by spreading your budget throughout the campaign period, so that you earn more leads overall. You could also split your budget using the 70/20/10 model, championed by PPC Hero. This approach breaks your budget down into three parts:

• 70% of your budget allocated to constantly-running or “evergreen” campaigns
• 20% of your budget allocated to campaigns that have a high probability for success
• 10% of your budget allocated to brand new ideas

This method ensures your budget is utilised in the best possible way and can be tweaked depending on your success rate.

Seasonality

Alternatively, by researching revenue trends and search volume trends you could plan your PPC budget according to seasonality. This way, you’ll be able to effectively manage your budget as you have particular times of the year that keywords are more active. Planning and executing a seasonal campaign can be difficult but taking a pragmatic approach is the best way to go.

How much should you spend?

It’s no secret that you’ll have to spend money in order to make money. However, the question still remains: how much should spend on a campaign?

Your annual budget for your PPC is a key part of your overall strategy, therefore it’s essential to figure out the ways in which you can make the most out of your spend. For example, you could do the following:

Calculate cost estimates and work backwards

By first estimating how much the campaign will cost, you’ll be able to work backwards to determine how much you should invest in getting the project off of the ground as well as estimates for metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS), cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-lead (CPL), and cost-per-conversion.

Be flexible

As part of setting a budget for your ad spend, you need to be flexible. You’ll need for your goals to be attainable (per your SMART goals) therefore, you need to determine how much profit you want to achieve whilst paying attention to a variety of factors along the way.

STAGs (single theme ad groups)

Although SKAGs were a long-used strategy back in the day, STAGs have long since taken over. Arguably most suitable to use when taking advantage of close variants, this strategy allows you to have multiple keywords that are centred around particular themes and sub-themes.

Another benefit is that you can align the set budget with the profit – something that was far more difficult to track with SKAGs.

Using data science

An umbrella term that encompasses all major data analysis fields including predictive analytics and statistics, data science can be used to generate invaluable insights that assist with PPC budgeting.

For example, by using it, you could determine when customers are more likely to buy. Through this, you can then automatically increase your bids to efficiently reach the widest possible audience during this time.

Key PPC budgeting terms

There are several key PPC budgeting terms that you should pay attention to, including the following:

ROI – Return on Investment is a tool that will measure the amount of money that you gain or lose in relation to how much you initially invested. Typically expressed as a percentage, it’s essential to use in PPC budgeting. The formula for it is as follows: ROI = (Net Profit/ Investment Cost) x 100.

Ad Spend – Ad Spend is the amount of money that’s spent on a particular advert. A business will typically look at how this has increased/decreased over the past year and factor it into their new PPC budget.

ROAS – Return on Ad Spend determines the efficiency of the PPC campaign. By using the formula ROAS = Campaign Revenue/Cost of Campaign, you’ll be able to see how effective the ad has been, in comparison to how much revenue you received for it.

CPC – Cost Per Click is the price that you pay for each click within your PPC campaign. Representing an interaction with the ad or a direct visit, it’s a vital factor in understanding how successful it’s been.

CPA – Cost Per Action directly measures how much your business has invested in exchange for a conversion. This will typically be higher than your Cost Per Click as fewer leads will convert.

CPL – Cost Per Lead is the amount that you invest in order to obtain new leads. To calculate this, you can use a CPL formula; such as – the cost of your ad spend/total attributed leads.

PPC budgeting tools

By using budgeting tools, you’ll be able to change your budget at any time and effectively track how much you’re spending. In order to optimise your budget, you could use PPC software such as Adzooma.

A platform that assists with the management of your budget, it has a mixture of custom-built software, as well as incorporating suggestions from Facebook Ads and Google Ads.

Conclusion

Overall it’s clear to see the importance of PPC budgeting and why it’s something that you should be doing from the get-go. Of course, every business’ approach to budget management will be different.

And it will depend on several factors including your preferences, overall goals and ad spend. However, when done effectively, it can result in very effective PPC campaigns that bring in favourable sales. Just make sure that from the start, you’re using the right budgeting tools and software to get the job done.