When people talk about keyword search ads, they would know about Google Ads (or formerly called AdWords). People mostly would not realize Bing (the competitor of Google mainly in the U.S. market and a few other markets) has a professional designed keyword search ad program. On Bing, it has a relatively older audience base. When using Bing Ads as a text-based ad platform with keyword searches, it gives marketers a good alternative testing ground.
Usually paid search marketers would set up the Google Ads campaigns, and then copy and paste everything across to Bing Ads. That is one of the easiest ways to run ads concurrently on two different platforms. In paid search advertising, the success of a campaign would usually rely heavily on how well you have set up the initial campaign. In other words, the optimization of paid search started right from the setup phase. Refer to the Google AdWords Optimization Checklist.
When you are ready to launch on both platforms, let your campaigns run for at least from 1 day to 1 week. When the ads in your campaigns have received sufficient impressions and clicks, you will also start to see other data metrics in your reports. The upside of Google is that without any doubt, there are always more people searching on Google than on Bing. In any normal day, your Google Ads could easily generate more clicks in total than from Bing Ads.
But you will also have to look at the click through rates of your ads. In general there are many more competitions on Google. For example, for the same keyword (that would trigger ads to appear), Google would have showed 8 ads, but Bing may only display 2 ads. With 8 ads in total, there are many choices for users to decide which to click, or not click at all. This leads to the possibility of your Google ads yielding a relatively lower click through rate (CTR). Click through rate is the number of clicks over the number of impressions in percentage.
Both Google Ads and Bing Ads use the Quality Score metric to determine the rank of an individual ad. The higher the rank of your ad, the most clicks your ad should usually get. Therefore, it leads to a higher CTR. There are a few contributing factors towards the Quality Score, and one of the main factors is CTR. When your ad doesn’t get a high enough CTR, its rank (or position) will definitely suffer.
At the end of the day, the key is to get as many conversions as possible for the limited advertising budget that the marketers have. CTR and other metrics may be important, but in the business world they aren’t the most important when they are compared to the bottom line i.e. The total number of sales and the revenue that is generated by all the sales.
