As of June 1st, Microsoft has successfully soft-launched Bing.com as the new and improved Live Search. The big question becomes: how should advertisers react, if at all, and ensure that they are in prime position to reap the benefits of all the hype, praise, and the hefty $80 – $100 Million in branding efforts from Microsoft?
As the graph below from alexa.com indicates, Bing has generated a lot of interest in the first day of production, and this trend should continue for the short term. Incremental page views translate to incremental clicks and potentially sales.
Preliminary traffic trends for Bing.com
Advertisers should anticipate increased exposure on Bing and increase budgets accordingly on AdCenter. While it’s impossible to determine the exact traffic increase and the duration thereof, Microsoft’s massive branding budget will surely help maintain higher traffic levels for at least several weeks, probably maxing out at 2 months. We recommend doubling if not tripling budgets on Bing and continual performance monitoring to ensure that campaigns are not capping and ROI remains solid.
This should be good news for advertisers, as Live Search has always been the top performing search engine in terms of ROI, yet has never had the volume to legitimize the kind of effort SEMs put into managing accounts on Google AdWords or even Yahoo! Panama. That said, an increase in “buzz” traffic could lead to a drop in ROI as these new users may just be test-driving Bing and are not the loyal MSN shoppers SEMs have grown accustomed to. Increased traffic and interest also means more competition in the marketplace. Any comprehensive SEM effort already includes AdCenter, so it’s safe to assume that marketers are paying special attention to the effects of the Bing launch and are upping bids to ensure they get their share of the traffic. As a result, expect CPCs to increase across the board and, in the short term, hold at the increased levels.
It’s in these unpredictable situations that advanced bid management really shines. How can advertisers using advanced bid management software capitalize on this situation? If the software allows rules to be defined using multiple data sets (each rule is assigned to analyze the data set for a unique date range), create and employ a set of rules following this simple 3-step framework:
- For yesterdays data set, if ROI < goal, then decrease bids by 5 – 10%
- Over the last 7 days, if ROI > or = goal and avg rank is greater than 2, then increase bids by 5 – 10%
- Over the last 7 days, if ROI < worse than goal, then decrease bids by 10 – 15%
Note: For CPA or CoS models, invert the greater than and less than signs.
This basic set of rules will react to significant changes in consumer behavior in the short term (as traffic fluctuates on a daily basis), while keeping ROI at or above goal on a weekly scale. Once traffic stabilizes, re-evaluate profitability of Bing traffic and establish a new set of rules customized to performance.
While it’s easy to believe that incremental traffic is coming out of the woodwork, we have to assume that the vast majority of searches being made on Bing in the next few weeks will come at the expense of Yahoo! and Google, at least temporarily [slightly] shifting the balance of searches towards Microsoft. As a result, expect to see very similar overall stats, except for a possible uptick in conversion rates as MSN has historically provided.
