10 Tips for Winning With Bing Product Ads

The Bing Product Ads marketplace is still developing, so here are 10 tips to help you succeed, including advice on setting up for success, optimization, and a look at what's coming.

Change is constant for marketers. And over the past few years, options have grown for e-commerce marketers of retail products, from UGG boots to quesadilla makers to wooden nunchucks. As product listing ads (PLAs) change to Shopping Campaigns, it’s important to note that it’s also been five months since Bing Product Ads launched. And the feedback from advertisers is that conversion rates with Product Ads can be better than with their corresponding text search ads, reports Brittney Thomas, retail product manager at Bing Ads.

Five months since launch means the marketplace is still developing. So there’s still a lot to learn in order to perfect your campaign. Today we’re looking at tips for Bing Product Ads, including:

  • Setting up for success
  • Optimization 
  • What’s coming

Setting Up for Success

Your Product Ad campaign is two important pieces: Campaign management (this is no different than managing your text ad campaign) and feed management. Your feed is where the ad originates, so getting this piece right is the only way you’ll see success with Product Ads. Your feed is your catalog of products. As an aside, the primary difference between Product Ads and regular text search ads is that you don’t bid by keyword with Product Ads. You bid by product target. So there are no keyword lists to manage, making Product Ads a bit easier than text ads.

Here are some tips for setting up your campaign and feed that will put you on the right track:

  1. Your “Store Name” is the merchant name that will appear in your ads – so name your store accordingly.
  2. “Required fields” really are. Fill them in accurately. These fields are used to match queries to your ad. Help Bing help you.
  3. Make the description field work hard. Highlight product details here for better query matching.
  4. When your ad serves, the title truncates at 32 characters. So make sure the most important parts of your title are in those first 32 characters. For a particularly attractive ad, make the title only 32 characters long, so the whole thing shows without being cut off.
  5. Create at least one product target that includes all of your products. This allows Bing to see all of your offerings and pull what matches the query best.

product-ad-campaigns

Optimization

With text ad campaigns, the marketplace is well-seasoned and offers a long, rich history of data to analyze for optimization tips. With Product Ads, history is still being built. Optimizing at this point relies on common-sense tactics that can boost outcomes:

  1. Freshness matters. Change/update your feed at least every 30 days.
  2. Describe products in a way that is relevant to your user. “Pink,” not “fuchsia.”
  3. Test images. This is as important as testing ad copy for regular text search ads. Some images will get better response than others – find out which those are.
  4. Bing’s feed doesn’t yet allow color or size differentiation, so use the description field to dial in these details.
  5. If your product catalog uses numbers for color names and you’re importing directly to your Bing Ads feed from it, you’ve got to catch this and enter actual color names. Because Bing has no way of knowing that 780934 means “blue.”

Coming Soon to Bing Product Ads

While Bing continues to tune the Product Ads matching capability and algorithm, they’re also knuckling down on some smaller details that help advertisers:

  • Share of Voice Reporting – Learn what share of impressions you’re missing out on and, more importantly, why.
  • Mobile Product Ads – Still in development, with closed beta testing happening right now.
  • Bing Shopping Campaigns – Still in development, planning to begin beta testing early in 2015.

Tell Us Your Experience

The holiday shopping season is about to lift off, so it’s a great time to prepare for what is next. What’s your experience with Shopping Campaigns or Bing Product Ads? Tell us in the comments below.

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