When you think of popular remarketing channels, remarketing in Bing probably isn't the first option to come to mind. Most digital advertisers rely on platforms like Google Ads or AdRoll for their remarketing campaigns. However, when the root goal of all remarketing campaigns is to improve the ROAS of your original advertising efforts. So the platform you choose should be based on the numbers, not popularity.
Truth is that Bing's platform has most of the features that search marketers look for in remarketing platforms. And Bing has been continuously working to make its Universal Event Tracking (UET) even more intuitive and easier to use. This is all for the sake of making your remarketing campaigns easier to set up and more functional/successful in the long run.
In this post, we'll cover the basics of Bing remarketing, plus five reasons why you should consider it in your next campaign.
Remember: in the end, remarketing is about improving the ROI of your original search campaigns. So always keep your eyes on actual monetary returns in regards to the metrics that you're inspecting.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for tips so good that we might put ourselves out of business.
The most obvious value of remarketing is it allows you to better cater your secondary ads to users based on past behavior. You essentially get a second attempt at bat.
With remarketing campaigns, as the name implies, you can (re)reach users who've previously clicked on your ads or visited your site. You can personalize your remarketing ads on your prospect's behavior, thus increasing your conversion rates. What's better yet, Bing remarketing can be implemented in your current Bing advertising campaigns or in your Bing Shopping campaigns as well.
By targeting users who've already expressed interest in your brand/product, you should see more engagement and higher conversion rates. In turn, you'll start to see more purchases and sales, thus improving your ROAS (return on ad spend).
Bing remarketing offers a very flexible, cross-channel style of remarketing. It's similar to RLSA campaigns in Google Ads, with the added benefits of extending across to Bing Shopping Campaigns.
This way, you can remarket to finely tuned, custom lists with new ads, as well as retarget previously engaged users with familiar content.
The way remarketing (also known as retargeting) works in Bing is by adding a UET tag to your site. We mentioned earlier how Bing has been working to making their UET more intuitive and functional with remarketing. What's nice about the Bing UET tag is that this singular tag tracks all the conversions and user behavior on your site.
Depending on which behaviors or specific actions you want to prioritize, you can segment your users into different lists that you can use as remarketing audiences.
So, for example, if you're managing an eCommerce site and want to target users who bounced off your site with items in their cart, you can build a list for that specific behavior. Or, you can choose specific products to create segmented lists for. Below are just a few examples of what types of actions/behaviors you can track to create highly specific lists by using Universal Event Tracking.
- destination URLs
- page visit duration
- pages viewed per visit
- subscriptions
- app installations
- button clicks
- new or returning customers
- specific products viewed
- time of day
- geographical location of visitor
- etc...
Bing has an elaborate assortment of data for marketers to access so they can better personalize and customize their ads to previously interested visitors. Depending on what specific audience you're trying to reach, you can create whatever kind of custom list you need.
Keep in mind however that these lists will need to reach at least 1000 users before Bing Ads will let you use them as an audience.
Once you have your audience, you can create a specific ad group for this audience in the Bing Ads platform and create a hyper targeted campaign just for these users. You can also increase your bids after seeing initial success in your campaigns, up to a 900% increase in fact.
Another great aspect of remarketing in Bing Ads is that you can customize your UET tag to create lists across all of your different marketing channels. That's right, you can create unique segments to target based on what channels your past users have come from as well.
Of course it's important that your unique campaigns have customized UTM parameters where you've labeled the source. This will help you distinguish which audiences you're targeting and which channels they came from later on.
The best way to do this is to create a new remarketing audience in Bing and name it after the specific channel/source you'd like to target. For example, create a remarketing audience called “Facebook” to build a list from your social ad campaigns. Then, you can create a UTM for your audience with the specific code "utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc."
Now you'll be able to view all the specific traffic and conversions coming from that source. Bing Ads will start to build a list for you to remarket to once it hits 1000 users.
Cross-channel remarketing in Bing isn't isolated to just the search network and Facebook. It can be used for Bing Shopping campaigns as well. This is a huge win considering that remarketing is considered a must for improving your ecommerce ROI.
And, by being able to advertise to segmented lists based on the past shopping cart behavior, you can not only encourage users to convert on products they left in their cart, you can take it one step further.
By using destination URL tracking you can even create segmented lists to target users who successfully purchased your product and landing on your thank-you page to upsell related products later on down the road.
This is a great hidden tactic in eCommerce remarketing as it allows you to increase the lifetime value of your average customers - which can lead to massive improvements in ROI.
Now, the truth is that Google Ads and AdRoll are both popular because they both have more than merit to their name. But the point of this blog post is to show you the value of using Bing Ads as your remarketing platform (or at least incorporating Bing into your remarketing efforts).
So, now that we know how remarketing in Bing Ads works and how to set it up, let's take a look at its various benefits. There's more benefits to using Bing than just its multichannel capabilities.
For starters, there's an obvious benefit for choosing the Bing Ads platform for your remarketing campaigns. While it may not boast the same high user volume as Google does, it also doesn't deal with the high competition.
As the folks at Adespresso put it:
Bing might have less overall usage and less traffic, but what if you could capture that traffic without competing against dozens of advertisers?
Dealing with less competition in your remarketing, as well as your original PPC campaigns, will help lower initial bids as well as make initial click-through-rates (CTR) higher. This in turn should lower your cost-per-clicks (CPC) as well. And that's where the real fun comes in.
As we like to preach here at KlientBoost, lowering your CPC is one of the best ways to build up your paid search performance. And there's many reasons behind this logic. For starters, a lower CPC gets you two big wins right off the bat:
- Spending less per click means more clicks for same spend
- A lower CPC often reflects a high Bing quality score
We often employ our SKAGs technique in order to increase the CTRs of our ads with lowering our CPC as the end goal (PPC wise). Then we rely on our CRO expertise to convert our users.
So what's this have to do with Bing? It means that Bing is awesome — because you're already starting off with CPC's below the Google average! In fact, the average CPC in Bing is around $8 while the average CPC in Google is closer to $20.
Bing also gets the upper hand when you're targeting an older age demographic. We've seen a great deal of success with some of our clients here at Klientboost that advertise towards age groups 50+ remarketing to them via Bing Ads.
When we've added on the customizable capabilities of remarketing in Bing Ads to these campaigns, we've seen some consistent and impressive wins over Google in regards to CPC, CTR, and even CPA.
And when it comes to improving your ROAS, cutting down your CPA (cost per acquisition - of actually closing a sale or purchase) is a huge priority.
Another benefit of remarketing in Bing Ads is something that is shared across all Bing advertising efforts. And that’s an increased granularity and functional editing at the ad group level.
Google Ads still offers you quite a bit of custom targeting at the campaign level in regards to audience, device, location, etc... However, these settings are all locked in once you click down to the ad group level.
With Bing, on the other hand, you can continue to customize your ad groups within specific campaigns. This helps with split testing as well as a simple diversification of your multichannel marketing efforts.
Lastly, and this is something that not every knows, Bing remarketing allows you access to a somewhat "richer" clientele pool.
And by "richer," I mean "have more money to spend."
Lame jokes aside, it's true. Bing reports that one of the reasons that marketers have continuously noted the higher ROI from Bing is that the average Bing user earns more than the average Google user, and therefore has more disposable income.
So, as it is with Bing remarketing, you literally get to retarget already interested users with more money to spend, and pay less to do so.
...What are we waiting for again?
The takeaways are obvious. Bing's lower CPCs and CPAs make it a prime channel for remarketing campaigns. If you want to re-engage with your most valuable customers/leads (the ones who already know you), then remarketing in Bing Ads is certainly worth considering.
Keep in mind that whenever you're dealing with paid advertising, you're paying to play. And whenever you are spending money for each click on your ads, you want to make sure you're making as much back a possible.
In an ideal world, all your traffic would be "lava hot" in regards to conversion intent. But, for now, remarketing in Bing Ads is a great place to start heating up your traffic and growing your ROAS and ROI.