In response to feedback from marketers, Bing has updated its search terms report to significantly extend the data available for search engine optimization purposes. The new report contains 100% of search terms, which is 20 to 40 times more than it has included in the past, offering users a comprehensive understanding of their traffic.
The search terms report can be accessed via the reports tab on the Bing user interface. By using the dimensions tab, users can restrict the list to only those terms that have received at least one click. Importantly, a list of zero-click search terms is also available, making it possible to tell when ads are falling short of the expectations of particular kinds of searcher. This could enable marketers to restructure their pitches to make them more appealing in relation to particular popular queries or to rule out some areas of the market and focus more directly on those where they are seeing success.
Fady Khoury, program manager for the Bing Ads Platform, wrote: “By using the newly-found negative keyword candidates, advertisers can instantly improve their CTR and QS, thus achieving lower cost and higher ROI in advertising.” The option will be welcomed by search engine marketing specialists who have struggled in recent months because of the shift to secure search, which has left them with a dearth of useful information. Some had been talking seriously about the death of SEO. The change at Bing will not only help with the refinement of ads there but will also make it easier to improve ads run on other search engines, though it is always worth remembering that different search engines attract slightly different groups of users.
“It is worth noting that this change will also enhance the data quality for search terms,” says Bing. “With the inclusion of the 0-click search terms, the issue of understated impressions and overstated CTR for a search term has been completely solved. Advertisers now have the complete picture around the search terms to make more precise evaluations.”
In order to save money, it is a good idea to disassociate ads from those search terms that do not result in clicks by adding them to the search terms report as negatives. This can also be done with any inadvertently associated terms that potentially send out the wrong message for the brand, and it makes it easy to adjust targeting for different advertising campaigns. Overall, the changes produce such a valuable dataset, considering the potential for adjustment and experimentation, that they may well attract new users to Bing.
