As a small business owner, you’re probably well across the fact that Google is the world’s number one website. So when it comes to choosing between Google AdWords and Bing Ads, the choice is easy, right? Actually, it’s not that clear-cut. While Google does have the US search market covered, Bing is not as far behind as you may think. It also publishes some interesting data on user demographics and industries that can help inform your decision of where to get the most bang for your buck.

Search estimates for Bing and Google

As stated earlier, Google is the number one website in the world, and there are a staggering 3.5 billion Google searches per day worldwide. By comparison, Bing has about 160 million searches per day worldwide. However, in the US, Bing actually holds a 33.5% share of the search market. It also claims to reach 68 million US searchers who do not go search through Google – so if your ideal customer is in that group, you’d best be paying attention to Bing.

Who uses Bing? Who uses Google?

According to Bing’s own research, its average user is female, with a family income of $100K, about 45 years old, educated, and married with children. To break the data down a bit further, 30% of its target audience is on $100K family income. The gender split is 51% female, 49% male. Half of the audience is married or living with a partner, and nearly 40% is between 35-54 years old. Over one third of the audience has a degree.

Apple only holds about 14% of the PC/Mac market share, so of the 67 million units of computers sold worldwide last year, 90% of them are using the Windows operating system, which comes with Internet Explorer or Edge installed – and Bing is the default search engine. So unless a user is interested or savvy enough to change their default browser or search engine, they’re likely to be using Bing.

There is a lot of data out there on Google’s users, but as most of it is at least three years old, we’re not including it. It doesn’t publicize its own demographic information, though the general consensus is that Google’s users are likely to be younger, more tech-savvy, and white-collar.If your business is targeting customers under the age of 35, or tech consumers, you’re likely to want to focus exclusively on Google AdWords for your search budget.

Major Differences Between Bing Ads and Google AdWords for Small Business

REAL ESTATE (NUMBER OF ADS DISPLAYED)

There are more options for Bing Ads to display ads, as it still includes ads down the side of the search results page, whereas Google got rid of their sidebar over a year ago. So if you’re in a highly competitive industry, you’ve got more chance of your ads actually creating impressions on Bing than AdWords – but of course conversely, it shows more of your competitors’ ads as well.

CAMPAIGN TARGETING

All in all, the ad set up is more flexible in Bing, and allows you to make changes at an ad group level, which is more targeted than AdWords’ campaign level changes.

You are also able to adjust campaign time zones in Bing, which you can’t do in AdWords – if you’re in one time zone, you can’t specify that an ad appears in a different time zone, which can make campaign time targeting confusing (particularly if you’re working across multiple time zones).

While both AdWords and Bing Ads offer location targeting, in AdWords this must be specified at the campaign level, which would then apply to all ad groups. In Bing, you can specify the location at an ad group level, which means that you could potentially look at a state-wide campaign, but with city or region ads (to different landing pages or offers).

BUDGETS

The set up of spending limits was, until April 2017, slightly different too – you were able to set a monthly budget in Bing, but it has since dropped that ability and now both AdWords and Bing Ads have daily limits only.

IMAGES

Visual sitelinks are currently in beta (testing phase) for AdWords, but essentially, it’s going to be a mobile-only carousel of images that relate to sitelinks advertised in the ad itself. Bing’s own Image Extensions are currently live across both desktop and mobile, and allows you to add up to six images. There’s no specific data for its effectiveness, but inclusion of “rich snippets” or images is generally known to increase click through rate – anything that makes your ad stand out from the crowd.

Google AdWords Image Extensions

Bing Ads Image Extensions

NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

Within Google AdWords, adding in negative keywords means that searches that include those keywords will not trigger your ad to appear. This makes sense, as it means that you can exclude irrelevant searches and therefore they don’t cost you money. However, in Bing Ads, if a target keyword and negative keyword both include the same word (bearing in mind that a keyword can also be a phrase), your ad will still show – it’s as if Bing is giving your keywords the benefit of the doubt, whereas AdWords takes a more hardline approach.

CONVERSIONS

Both AdWords and Bing offer options for tracking users’ actions after they click on your ad – AdWords lets you use your Google Analytics defined goals, which is quite straightforward, or you can use specific AdWords-only goals. But if you do go with the AdWords-only goals, you’ll need to create a tracking tag and place that on your destination page. With Bing, you need to add a site-wide tracking tag, then create the conversion itself within the Ads interface (which is useful if you’ve got multiple goals). This Universal Event Tracking tag also helps with remarketing, as it’s automatically set up within the tag itself.

REMARKETING

Remarketing, which is when ads appear to users who have already visited your site or a specific page or product on your site, on Bing Ads is simple to set up, but it does require that you develop a list of at least 1000 people in a segment before your ads will be served to them. AdWords has a superior remarketing product. In addition to using its Display Network (showing ads on other websites as well as its search network), it also has more options than Bing Ads for remarketing. This includes customer list remarketing, video remarketing (for people who’ve interacted with your videos on YouTube, for example), the standard and search remarketing, and dynamic remarketing, which adjusts the ad headline based on what the user has searched for.

Which one is easier to use?

Google has recently updated its user interface, and it’s a lot more user-friendly. It’s clear, easy to use, and its Overview screen has all the information you’d want to know about your campaigns at a glance. It makes ad creation straightforward, and reporting and settings are in a more obvious section of the site than they were in the old interface. By contrast, Bing Ads is very much a mirror image of the old AdWords set up. With so much data to display, it can be difficult to design an interface that makes sense and brings the most important information to the fore, but hiding campaign information “under the fold” as Bing Ads does when there are alerts provides a subpar experience.

Does Bing Ads or Google AdWords produce better results?

Large US online advertising firm WordStream recently produced an infographic that shows click-through rates, cost per click, conversion rate, and cost per action across Bing Ads by industry that will be useful to benchmark your results. A year prior to that, they produced the same data for Google AdWords, which is included here.

Overall, though, their results show that Bing “wins” by having a higher click-through and conversion rate and lower cost per click and action. Its biggest downfall, is, of course, its reach – Bing just can’t compete with the sheer weight of numbers of Google searches. However, at about one-third of all US searches, it’s certainly worth a percentage of your total search budget, even if it’s just for testing purposes.

	Click-through rate	Cost per click	Conversion rate	Cost per action
Google AdWords	1.91%	$2.32	2.70%	$59.18
Bing Ads	2.83%	$1.54	2.94%	$41.44

Source: WordStream (Based on a sample of 1,242 US-based WordStream client accounts in all verticals (representing $6 million in aggregate Bing Ads spend) who were advertising on Bing Ads between July and September 2017. Average figures are median figures to account for outliers. All currency values are posted in USD.)

Hallam Internet in the UK also recently ran a comparative study with a large client and used the same ads across both advertising platforms. Their results are below:

	Spend	Conversions	Cost-per-acquisition
Google	£29,319.81	919	£31.90
Campaign 1	£25,518.49	771	£33.09
Campaign 2	£2,516.03	97	£25.94
Campaign 3	£1,285.29	51	£25.20
Bing	£1,935.75	165	£11.73
Campaign 1	£1,723.34	143	£12.05
Campaign 2	£136.41	15	£9.09
Campaign 3	£76.00	7	£10.86

According to the data, it was 67% cheaper per acquisition through Bing than AdWords. The main difference was in the conversion rate, and the author posited that it may have been the characteristics of Bing’s users that was actually causing the differentiation in conversion rate.

Conclusion

In the end, what the results show is that if your target demographic isn’t a youth market, you should be paying attention to Bing. While Google dominates the search market, Bing’s published data shows that targeting the particular industries or demographics that are already using its search engine can lead to lower costs and higher conversions than using AdWords.

If you’re in a very competitive industry, or have a low budget, it’s worth taking a chance on Bing Ads. Your ads won’t reach as many people as they could using AdWords, but there is potential for improved results. Bing Ads also have more options for adjusting campaigns at an ad group level, so if you need to get really granular within your campaign (e.g. two different ads going out to one particular region but with different budgets), you’ll fare better with Bing – AdWords just doesn’t have the same functionality.

If you definitely need to reach as many people as possible (for example, you’re in a niche industry), or your audience skews younger, you should focus on Google AdWords. Similarly, if you want to use remarketing, Google has a much broader range of features than Bing, so you should stick with Google.

A time- and cost-effective way to test is to use the same ads on both Google AdWords and Bing Ads (you can import your AdWords content into Bing Ads), with your Bing budget being about 25% of your Google AdWords budget, and advertise on both for 30 days. It needs to be at least that long in order to give the ads a chance to work and settle down. After the month is up, analyze the results, and adjust your marketing. If you found that you got better results from Bing, put more of your budget into it and optimize for the Bing Ad experience (e.g. with image ads). If not, and AdWords was clearly outperforming Bing Ads, then at least you’ve tried it, found that it didn’t resonate with your audience, and you move on.

And although the user interfaces are now quite different, if you’ve used AdWords in the past, you won’t have any trouble navigating around Bing Ads. And the actual process of setting up an ad is very similar – you need a budget, targeting, content, including headlines, and extensions, so you’re likely to pick up how it works quite easily on either platform.

Your website is one of the most valuable sources of marketing, but many small businesses under-utilize it as a tool and simply “set and forget” – after it’s built, it’s got your phone number and address on it, so that’s all you need, right?

Wrong. More than one-third of internet users in the US said they first find the small businesses that they use by researching online. And nearly 40% said that they will visit a store’s website first before they go to the actual bricks-and-mortar shop. If your website isn’t up to scratch, you could be losing customers before they even contact you or visit a storefront.

When you set up your website, it’s vital that you install analytics tracking to be able to measure and optimize its performance. Google Analytics is free, easy to set up, and widely used, which makes it ideal for small business. Here, we look at the ten reports that are most important to small business, and that can really give you valuable insight into how your site performing.

1. Acquisition Overview Google Analytics Report

This report tells you how people found your website – whether they came via organic search (using a search engine like Google), referral (they clicked a link from another website), direct (essentially, a pool of “unknowns” – it can be when a customer inputs your URL into the address bar, or when a link isn’t properly tagged, or someone goes from a private, secured website to an unsecured site), social (from Facebook or Twitter, for example), or paid search (which is advertising, like using Google’s Search Network).

By understanding how customers found your site, you can look at where you need to focus your attention. If a lot of people come to your site from Facebook, you can look at ramping up your activity there, and perhaps doing some Facebook advertising – your efforts on Facebook are obviously working. By contrast, if you notice that you’re getting very little traffic from organic sources, like Google, you might need to look at some search engine optimization (SEO) – essentially, making your website as attractive as possible to Google.

2. Mobile Overview Google Analytics Report

One of the most definite insights into internet use over the last decade is the rise of mobile devices to access the internet. In 2017, 73% of the entire population accessed the internet through their mobile phone, and roughly 60% of all traffic to the top 10,000 sites is mobile traffic. By 2021, mobile internet usage will reach penetration of 86.5% in the US.

What this means is that if your site isn’t mobile-ready, your customers will have a hard time visiting you online. Using Google Analytics, you can find out how many people visit you on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. You can also see (as you can in almost every GA report) how long those people stayed online; whether they left after only visiting one page; and what percentage of people “converted” (hit one of your predefined goals). If you’ve had your site set up for a while, it’s likely that you’ll see similar data to the chart below – a definite growth in mobile usage, and a decline in people accessing your site by desktop.

3. Demographics Overview Google Analytics Report

The introduction of demographics reports has been cause for huge excitement in the analytics community. Through this, you can see the gender split and age ranges of customers on your site (usually a subset of the data). Google gathers this data through the third-party DoubleClick cookie, and looks at things like Google Account details, social media profiles, and browsing activity to determine demographic information.

You do have to enable the collection of the demographic data within your Google Analytics account, but once you do, it can be invaluable in informing your marketing activities, and giving you the scoop on exactly who your online customer is – and this may differ from your instore or face-to-face customer. By learning more about the people who visit your site, you can adjust it to better suit them.

 

4. Search Console Queries in Google Analytics

One of the most commonly-asked questions about analytics is “what do people search for to get to my site?” Unfortunately for many site owners, about six years ago, Google encrypted the search data so that search terms are replaced with “(not provided)”. They did this to protect the privacy of a site’s users, but it also encourages people to sign up for Google’s AdWords product – search terms are easy to find in Google AdWords.

Fortunately, there are some workarounds. Within Google Analytics’ admin section, you can link another of their products, called Search Console (it used to be known as Webmaster Tools), to your account, and it will bring in search information for your domain. This includes search queries, which shows the number of times Google served up your site as an option to a particular search term, as well as your site’s average position for that term, your click-through rate, and the number of clicks to your site.

5. Content Drilldown Google Analytics Report

This report really starts to get into what customers are actually doing on your site – you can see your most popular pages (or products), how long people are staying on each page, whether it’s the last page they visited on your site, and how many unique pageviews of each page occurred. And within this particular report, it also shows you the information from a “category” level – so if you have various sections on your site, you can see which of those are resonating with your customers.

The report presents as a table, and where the Page Path shows a folder, it means that there’s more information within (i.e. that row is a category). For each category, you can also see important data such as unique views, time on page, exit, and bounce rate. Using this data, you can start to get a gauge on how customers are interacting with each page – do they spend an unusually long amount of time on a page? Perhaps it’s hard to read or navigate. Too short an amount of time to take it all in? Perhaps the page is throwing an error, or can’t be seen on mobile. Do a high number of people leave your site from one particular page? Maybe they’re getting kicked off, or the content is all wrong.

6. Top Events Google Analytics Report

One of the limitations of Google Analytics is that it doesn’t automatically set up tracking of important data like PDF downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or banner clicks. This needs to be set up separately from the basic GA install, and can either be added to each link or click, or (more easily) via Google Tag Manager. Once it’s done, however, you can access the Event reports and get information on how many downloads of product manuals you got in a particular week; how many people clicked the first banner on your home page versus the second banner; or how many people clicked on your referral links.

The Top Events report divides the events into Category, Action, and Label, which are all determined during set up. You might have a category called PDF, one called Videos, and one called Links. The Action may be Download, or Play (Pause/Stop, etc); or Click. The Label is generally the File Name or some variation that makes the event easily identifiable. Most important is the total events, but unique events also tells you how many unique events occurred within each session.

7. Goal Overview Google Analytics Report

One of the most important (and often overlooked) aspect of Google Analytics is goal set up. Even if you don’t have ecommerce facilities on your site (in fact, especially if you don’t have ecommerce), you will still have specific actions that you want your users to take when they visit, like creating an account, making an enquiry, registering for a free trial, or even something based off an event, like downloading a particular paper. You can (and should) still set up goals for purchases as well.

Adding a goal value to each of your goals will also “unlock” some great insights in other reports too, like giving each of your pages a value, showing how important (in a monetary sense) they are to your business. It can also show which of the acquisition channels (e.g. organic traffic, social networks) are having the greatest effect on your goal. For each goal, you can also set up a funnel, with its various required steps, to give you insight into where users are dropping off. Again, this isn’t just for ecommerce conversions – it can be for sign ups (is the process too complicated?), quizzes, free ebooks – anything where there are a number of pages as steps to follow.

8. Day of Week / Time of Day Google Analytics Report

This is a custom report, but you can easily download a template so that the hard work is already done for you.

With this report, you can get an understanding of the most important days and time of day for your online customers. Knowing when they visit the site can help you with advertising (target your advertising to the times when people are already logging on to your site), pop-up sales, and timing of maintenance, as well as the effect of other marketing, like any TV or radio advertising, email newsletters, or referral site campaigns.

Day of Week	Sessions	Pageviews	Pages / Session	Bounce Rate	% New Sessions
5	2,333	7,333	3.14	63.44%	58.29%
4	2,079	6,620	3.18	64.89%	53.44%
6	1,964	6,323	3.22	63.75%	53.41%
0	1,877	6,542	3.49	61.37%	53.06%
2	1,782	5,815	3.26	64.48%	55.50%
1	1,710	5,495	3.21	64.04%	54.27%
3	1,574	5,498	3.49	63.60%	51.72%

9. All Campaigns Google Analytics Report

When customers click on a link to come to your website, you should add parameters on to it that tell Google Analytics what the link is about. For example, if you set up Facebook advertising, it will ask you at some point to include your destination URL – the page link that customers will end up on. Best practice for doing this specifies adding some information to the end of that URL that passes information along to your website that includes the source (Facebook), the medium (ads), and the campaign name (Spring_sale). Some services, like MailChimp, do this for you automatically.

When people have come to your site using a properly tagged link, that information will appear in the Campaign report. Within this, you can see how effective each campaign has been to your website performance. By default, the report shows Campaign Name first (useful if you’re running the same campaign across different mediums – like a Christmas sale across Facebook, a newsletter, and a banner ad on another site), but you can also select it to show Source or Medium. The report also shows how many users and sessions happened on site due to the campaign; the pages and time on site for those sessions; and if any conversions occurred as a result of the campaign.

10. Behavior Flow Google Analytics Report

The Behavior Flow chart shows how customers move through your site, which works as a fantastic snapshot of the user journey. Beginning with the landing page (the first page a customer visits on your site), you follow the most popular user paths, with less popular journeys available as an minimized group of pages. This chart also shows the number of sessions that ended on each page as a percentage, to give an “at a glance” view on where you’re losing your customers.

Summary

These ten reports give you a fantastic overview into the performance of your site, and checking in with them on a regular basis means you will begin to spot areas that could be improved or modified in order to achieve your business goals. Within small business, every tool that can be leveraged to give you the jump on your competitor needs to be used, and knowing just how your site is working for you is paramount in today’s online world.

Is Google Analytics Helping Your Business?

If you aren’t currently using Google Analytics to optimize your marketing efforts, your missing out on free analytic data that is extremely valuable to your business. You can start tracking things like where your traffic is coming from, which marketing efforts are working, what pages were viewed, when your website is busiest, and more. Get in touch for a free consultation!