Bing Ads Intelligence

Google sunsetted their labs products in 2011, and many useful products were removed. However, Microsoft has come to the rescue with a great suite of products known as Bing Ads Intelligence.

Bing Ads Intelligence is an Excel plug-in tool, so you must own a copy of Excel to use it. In addition, you must have a Bing Ads account (it does not have to spend money, but you must have an account). If you own Excel and have a Bing Ads advertising account, you can download the plug-in from http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/ en-us/bing-ads-intelligence.

There are many useful data points you can see within the tool, and most are selfexplanatory. I also suggest taking a look at the demographics for your keywords just to make sure you are reaching the correct audience. For instance, Figure 3.34 shows the demographic data for the word bleach.

Figure 3.34 Bing Ads Intelligence data for the word bleach

By looking at this data, you can see that the major demographics for the word bleach are young males and not what most people think, which are females looking for Clorox bleach information. When you see outliers in demographic associations for your keywords, you should view that as a signal to learn more about that keyword.

I suggest downloading the tool and playing with the features. We could spend another 100 pages talking about how to use all the options of this tool. Suffice it to say, if you are advertising in a region where Bing has decent search volume, this tool will help you gain more insight into keywords for any PPC campaign.

The most important point to remember about tools is that they are only as good as their inputs and interpretations. If you put bad data into a tool, you will see bad data come out of the tool. If you do not understand the information being presented, or the business rules behind how the data is calculated, you may not be able to interpret the data to come to the correct conclusions.

Understanding what the tool does and how it calculates and presents the data is crucial in extracting valuable, actionable data from any toolset.