Google’s bidding algorithm is pretty well known to agencies like ours due to a lot of discussion in the industry and various workshops we have with our Google representatives throughout the year. Bing’s is less well known, mainly because it has been the 3rd string self serve ad platform that we haven’t taken much notice of until recently and because you’re lucky to hear a peep out of an agency rep (because they are swamped with learning it all themselves, having been brought over from Yahoo) or anyone from Bing.
With updates to their Desktop application it is easier to export a Google campaign straight into adCenter, although you need to be wary of importing negatives from your Google campaign because Bing is only capable of broad matching negatives. Max bids are also imported and the campaigns are set to run on Bing/Yahoo Search + Syndicated Search Partners (at the ad group level).
Although Google say they do not really enforce trademark issues (they ask you to take it up with the other party in their documentation), they actually do (see disapproved ad copy) and their serving & bidding algorithm pretty much squashes any hope of getting served on a competitors keyword, so for my clients, who all run brand campaigns, their cost per click pricing is always kept very low because of the quality score of their keywords.
This all makes perfect sense.
Bing’s adCenter (who will enforce trademarks even on keywords) apparently has a similar theory, but it may not be as complex as Google’s because of the trademark enforcement. From the adCenter Blog we are told that “adCenter favors advertisers with the most relevant ads and higher click-through-rates (CTR) weighted for position. Combining relevant ad copy with aggressive bids definitely pays off; after your ads prove to the system they are able to maintain a high CTR, the system makes it cheaper and cheaper for you to remain in a top position. Aggressive bids keep you in a top position, the top position yields more clicks, and more clicks lower the average cost-per-click..
I am bidding on brand terms, there is no bidding auction due to trademark enforcement, therefore my CPCs should be the minimum that adCenter allows for, being $0.05, right? In November an exact match of a brand keyword resulted in an average position of 1.28 and an average cost per click that was 3 times the CPC Google charged me.
I allowed it to run on Bing/Yahoo Search plus their Syndicated Partners for the first day or two. This resulted in some syndicated partners charging me up to $0.24 CPC for the ad group with the exact match keyword mentioned above. Since I had exported the campaign from Google I still have the CSV with all the maximum bids, of the 2 words I run in that ad group (yes, both exact match), neither has a max CPC bid that is more than $0.20.
In theory, and inadvertently, I was running the campaign the way the adCenter blog post suggests for the first part of the month, but the campaign failed to optimize the bids based on the algorithm, and I know this since CTRs were around 35% on Bing/Yahoo Search only. The exact match keywords spent roughly $4,500 over the course of the campaign, if the ad server had actually be working correctly (and I am stating it was not) my CPC should have been around the $0.05 mark and this ad group should have only cost me $1,500.
I pretty much fought with the ad server throughout November, cutting the campaign, very early on, back to Bing/Yahoo Search only, slashing max CPCs and working on my negative keyword lists when I had enough data to run search query reports. December is looking a lot brighter, but I don’t know whether someone corrected something on the back end, or it takes a month for their algorithm to pick up on a 35% CTR, in conjunction with my daily (even hourly) battering of the campaign with changes to try and keep costs under control.
In the end the campaign for this particular client spent more than Google and produced 1/5 of the result – so much for Bing being the ROI engine. This is currently being addressed (although painfully slowly) by our agency rep and Bing, and I am very curious to hear what their analysis is. I personally stand by my comment that the ad server’s algorithm failed.