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Recently I decided to try bing ads for my website, Green Vacation Deals. Green Vacation Deals gives a lot travel advice, reports on travel deals, etc. and we make our money through affiliate sales. I took advantage of the current Bing ads deal – if you spend $25 on Bing Ads, you can get a free $100. It seemed like kind of a no brainer for me to try because $25 is relatively cheap and is so little compared to how many new visitors I could get on my website – even if I didn’t make back the $25, at least I would increase my hits so it wouldn’t be a complete waste of money, right? Well, the ad exceeded my expectations and I more than made back the $25 I initially spend on extra sales! I did an ad for a blog entry I wrote listing tons of Black Friday & Cyber Monday travel deals, and I was able to sell multiple flights, theme park tickets, hotel stays, cruises, etc. Here are some things I did to help my Bing ad campaign more successful that will hopefully help your Bing ad campaign more successful:
- Make sure your keywords are specific: If you make your keywords too general, someone might click on your website who was looking for something else, and they’re less likely to make a purchase. For example, for my campaign, I did not use the search term “Cyber Monday Deals” because that’s very general and someone could be looking for a different kind of Cyber Monday Sale that is not travel specific and when they click on my ad and go to my website, they could leave immediately and then I just wasted money on the click. So instead I more used terms like “Cyber Monday Flight Deals”, because anyone searching for that specifically wants cheap flights and my blog entry mentioned specific airlines and travel companies that had sales.
- Don’t make your bids too low: I like to set a maximum cost-per-click for my bids because I don’t like to spend too much on any one click so I don’t go through my spending balance too quickly, but a mistake I’ve made in the past with other Bing or Google ad campaigns is making my minimum spending too low. If your maximum bid is too low then Bing may not show your ad, and then what’s the point of the running the campaign? For this campaign, I felt the best maximum was $1.00. My ads were running enough to be seen (and clicked!) but I didn’t spend too much on any one ad. Every industry is different so you may be able to spend less or you may have to spend more so see what works for you, but don’t go too stingy from the beginning.
- Don’t be afraid to fine tune your ad: After you’ve written your initial ad, don’t be afraid to keep tweaking if you don’t like your results. Also, if something changes, make sure you change your ad accordingly; for example, with my ad, on Black Friday I made the ad more specific about Black Friday but on Cyber Monday I changed the words on my ad to more reflect Cyber Monday.
- Get a good call to action in your ad: Because my ad was for Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales, there were a lot of great deals on my website, with the best being a sale where you could get a hotel for 90% off. I made sure to include in my ad “Save up to 90%” since that’s a big enough sale to get someone’s attention rather than make my ad very generic like “You can save money with a travel deal”. The more specific you can get the better and the more you can let someone know how clicking on your website will significantly help them the better, too.
- Use Dynamic Text: Dynamic Text is a really exciting feature of doing an ad because it can make your ad appeal to so many more people. Dynamic text is a word or phrase that automatically gets inserted in your Ad to make it more relevant. Take my ad for example. There were people who specially searched for Cyber Monday Jetblue Flight Deals. My ad didn’t mention Jetblue specifically, but with Dynamic Text Jetblue could be added and so when the person who searched for Jetblue ads saw my ad, my ad more reflected what he/she was looking for and that made it more likely for he/she to click on the ad. I highly recommend utilizing Dynamic Text to help bring traffic to your website.
So try to remember these tips – and make sure you click here to get the free $100 advertising credit!
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