Casting a Wider Net in SEM is Easier Than You Think

Search engine marketing (SEM) is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to attract new callers to your pay per call campaigns. And, if you’ve focused on SEM, chances are you’re familiar with Google AdWords. But did you know that by limiting your strategy to just one platform you may be missing the boat on more callers and even bigger returns?

It’s true.  

With just one ad buy through Bing Ads, you can reach 160 million unique searchers on the Bing Network who represent 5 billion monthly searches in the United States. That accounts for 31.3 percent of the search market. Who knew, right?

But who wants to go through the exercise of setting up all those campaigns in yet another platform? Very few, most likely.

Luckily, for the time-limited marketer, there’s an easy way to bring Google AdWords campaigns over to Bing Ads. It eliminates the worry and simplifies the process. It’s called the Google Import tool, and you can find it in the top navigation of Bing Ads online when you sign in to your account (if you don’t already have a Bing Ads account, you can get one here).

The 1, 2 and 3 of importing your Google AdWords campaigns into Bing Ads:

  1. Sign in to your Bing Ads account.
  2. Click Import Campaigns.
  3. Follow the steps to import your campaigns.

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If you want to use Bing Ads Editor for importing instead, download Bing Ads Editor for Windows or Bing Ads Editor for Mac and click Import to get started. Also, Bing Ads supports 4 million keywords and ads combined with Google Import, so it’s just as simple for the larger enterprise.

 

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Other tidbits about importing your campaigns into Bing Ads:

Language — When importing an AdWords campaign that contains multiple target languages, Bing Ads will select the campaign language with the largest market as your ad group target language.

Location — If a location target from Google AdWords does not exist in Bing Ads, campaigns targeting that location will be mapped to the parent location if matched in Bing Ads.

Now that you see how easy it can be to import your campaigns, you may want to consider advertising on both platforms. You might not even need additional budget. Try allocating just 30 percent of your SEM budget to Bing Ads, and it may help you reach new customers and give your revenue a boost. 

1. comScore qSearch, Explicit Core Search (custom), June 2016; the Bing Network includes Microsoft sites, Yahoo sites (searches powered by Bing), and AOL sites in the United States