When you want to maximize ROI from paid traffic, three things are essential:
- A solid fundamental concept for your ad, regardless of the intended format.
- Audience targeting that brings your message to an audience who will listen.
- A bidding strategy that maximizes conversions and minimizes ad expenses.
In the traditional approach to pay-per-click advertising, the ad network leaves the first issue to you, the advertiser. Led by Facebook and LinkedIn, most networks usually focus assets on the second problem – since doing so enhances the value of their data.
When a social media network launches a new bidding strategy, it’s an important occasion. When you optimize your bidding, you have the opportunity to drive down costs while achieving equal or better results.
Bing’s new ad options are both powerful and easy to use. And they might even rejuvenate flagging interest in the platform.
They include:
Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
This automated bidding strategy optimizes your campaign to generate conversions at the CPA you specify. All you have to do is set an average target cost for your CPA, which the system will attempt to achieve throughout the full 30 day period.
Maximize Conversions
Here, the Bing system automatically sets bids to maximize conversions without exceeding your specified budget. The bids are set in real time and may vary from one ad serve to another – they are influenced by factors including time of day and week.
To utilize either of the new bidding schemes, campaigns need to meet basic qualifications:
- You must have a minimum of 15 conversions on the account within the last 30 days.
- You must have Bing’s Universal Event Tracking implemented on the target website.
- Your campaign must target specified countries: U.S., UK, Canada, France, or Germany.
These bidding strategies began to go live gradually the week of Monday, July 30th. As of now, they should be available to most advertisers.
Although automated bidding strategies won’t give you the granular control manually adjusting bids will, they are your best bet when you’re managing large, complex campaigns. As algorithms get better, they can often cut through the clutter and find a workable solution to meet your goals.
Naturally, you should keep a close eye on any automated bidding option for the first few days after you implement it. Once it is up and running, be sure to compare it to your previous results on a weekly and monthly basis until you are fully satisfied that you’re getting value.
If you’ve paused your Bing campaigns – or, perhaps, never tried the platform – there’s never been a better time to explore the value it could offer.