Want to glean deeper insights into your search ad performance? Columnist John Cosley discusses four valuable ad insights tools within Bing Ads.
In sports, politics and business, you’re only as good as who you surround yourself with. But when it comes to strategy, you’re only as good as what you know — and having the right tools to keep you informed can mean the difference between great campaign performance and mediocre results.
With that in mind, I wanted to share my four favorite ad insights tools within Bing Ads to keep you informed – and outperforming both your advertising objectives and your competition.
Top Movers
Many shifting variables can lead to account performance variations, making tough work for marketers. Top Movers is an account-level report that is generated when certain click thresholds are met. The report provides a snapshot of changes in clicks, spend, and conversion over a selected time period, identifying campaigns and ad groups with the biggest performance changes.
Top Movers suggests possible causes of performance fluctuations, whether those are internal account changes, competition or eligible search volume. Even more important, it suggests possible actions to fix those undesirable performance fluctuations.
Top Movers is a one-stop shop to check account performance, increase productivity and reduce workload. Use this tool every week to quickly monitor your account’s performance over time.
Top Movers allows you to quickly diagnose your performance variation issues by providing the drivers (Campaigns and Ad groups) and possible causes of those changes. Bing Ads goes one critical step further, suggesting actions to resolve the issues.
Auction Insights
The Auction Insights report uses display URLs to help you quickly identify advertisers who are competing in the same auction, and to strategize how to compete effectively.
The Auction Insights report is generated at campaign, adgroup, and keyword level (preferred), providing an overview of who your competition is and where you stand against them in the auction – using parameters such as impression share, average position, overlap-rate, position above-rate, and top of the page rate.
If your impression share is below 100%, that indicates you lost impressions to competition in auction due to a variety of reasons (bid, budget, ad copy, etc.).
Auction Insights helps you learn about your competitors (through display URLs), and determine whether you should increase bid or budget, or improve ad copy to become more competitive, and ultimately, get more impressions. Similarly, a high average position score or low top of the page rate indicates scope for optimization around bid, budget and ad copy.
Auction Insights helps you monitor trends to identify increased competitive activity and stay competitive. By generating the Auction Insights report at different time periods or using the Bing Ads Intelligence (BAI) Excel plugin to generate the Auction Insights report, you can learn how an ad’s impression share, average position and top of page position has changed over time for specific keywords.
This can provide critical insights on the impact of new competition — or strengthening of existing competition — contributing to decreased impression share, top of page rate, etc.
Opportunities Tab
The Opportunities tab provides campaign optimization recommendations – Keyword, Bid, Budget, and Broad Match – to improve your performance. This tool gives you the estimated additional clicks and impressions you can expect to receive specific to each recommended opportunity and estimated additional spend.
Best of all, the Opportunities tab is easy to understand, and you can adopt opportunities with just a few clicks.
Bid Landscape
Thinking about changing your bids but worried about what it might do to your impressions or cost? Or maybe you want more clicks, but aren’t sure how much you need to increase your bid to make that happen.
Use Bid Landscape to fine-tune bids for your most important keywords. Bid Landscape shows you how different estimated bids would have impacted your impressions and clicks over the previous seven days.
Armed with the right data, any marketer can be a top performer. Use these tools, and you’ll soon achieve measurably better results with each and every campaign.