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Can Bing & adCenter Bring More To The Table For Large Advertisers?

During the week of January 4th, I had the privilege of spending a week with the Bing and adCenter teams in Bellevue. First off, I would like to thank them both for their tremendous hospitality.

Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team on that trip. One of the things I learned is what the adCenter team is doing to make it more attractive for enterprise scale customers to leverage adCenter to expand the PPC efforts.

Firstly, there was a clear recognition by the adCenter team regarding the challenges they face. They have a large and dominant competitor. Advertisers will start with AdWords, and then consider adding adCenter if the budget allows. However, even this is not a given.

For an enterprise advertiser that wants to increase their spend by 20%, it is far easier to simply jack up their bids in AdWords than it is to build new campaigns in adCenter. There are many reasons for this, including basic differences in account structure and capabilities.

The adCenter team is heavily focused on addressing this issue. The key elements of their efforts are:

  1. Simplifying the user experiences across all touchpoints.
  2. Reducing the time and effort to import an AdWords campaign into adCenter.
  3. Achieving feature parity as quickly as humanly possible.

The adCenter team refers to this as improving “Return on Time Spent”. The focus of the initative is to offer a better return for those advertisers who put their incremental dollars into adCenter. It is the right focus. And adCenter has some serious benefits to offer to enterprise advertisers, let’s look at the two biggest.

1. Audience Reach Is Still Sizable

comScore data shows that Bing’s market share is approximately 30% of the search market in the US. This is approaching 50%of Google’s market share, which is sizable enough to pay attention to.

The people searching on Yahoo, MSN, in Internet Explorer, and on Bing are often a different audience that the audience on Google. comScore data shows that 57 million of the searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo don’t use Google:

2.  Higher Likelihood of Purchase

There is also data to sugggest that there is a higher propensity for Bing users to convert into sales. According to ComScore, the unique searchers on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites (including Yahoo! Search, Bing, and partners) are likely to spend 24.1% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 5.5% more than Google searchers in the U.S.

These two benefits merit serious consideration. No doubt that the adCenter team will face ongoing challenges, but advertisers can find incremental market share and potential conversions here.

The adCenter team is also working on making adCenter experiences more intuitive for their customers; delivering better insights for campaign optimizations; and new ad formats and features that will help customers unlock additional volume.

All in all, I conducted 10 different interviews of adCenter team members, and I saw a highly engaged team focused on their goals. I think that it is likely that they will succeed in significantly improving the Return on Time Spent for enterprise advertisers.

For those who are interested in more detail, I will be publishing these interviews in the coming weeks on the Stone Temple Consulting blog.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


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