Bing Adwords

[BrianBar]

Hello Moz Community,

I am curious to see if anyone else is experiencing the troubles I am having with Bing Adwords.

In the past (not even a month ago), my companies campaigns were driving great traffic, with high CTR, Conv. Rate, and low CPC; but recently (start of February) traffic has increased (not the good kind) and CPC has gone through the roof. When I say not the good kind, I mean the traffic we are getting is not relevant at all to our industry our the campaign/ad groups targets at all.  These campaigns have been running for a good year with regular maintenance and great results.

I keep up to date with all the negative words, constantly am A/B testing copy and landing pages, and keeping up to date with good SEO/SEM habits.  Since February has started like I said traffic has increased (not the good kind) and search queries seem to be more and more outrageous by the day.

I guess my question is has anyone else experienced this and is it a possibility that Bing (Microsoft) loosened up their algorithm to drive more (I hate to say it) money into their pockets? I haven't heard/read anything publicly that they made such a change but I have read that they have had an increase in profit and a majority of CPC for accounts have increased without actual search share going up.

Please feel free to share you thoughts about this and if you have experienced this in anyway.

Thanks All,

Brian

[BrianBar]

John -

Again thank you for the insight. I will take a look at that report and see if there is anything out of the ordinary in terms of spend, etc.

Thanks again

[john4math]

Our Adwords CPCs are less than our Bing CPCs pretty much across the board.  From what I've read, that's the norm.  So it does sound like something fishy is going on.  If your Bing CPCs are up, it's likely true for your competitors as well, so they're probably also suffering.

The search partners report in Bing is pretty great... sometimes I've seen spikes on specific search partners that have caused a fair amount of wasted spend.  I believe in their interface they call it the "Website URL (publisher)" report.  Thankfully, it's easy to exclude specific partners.  That would be my #1 suspect for wasted spend!

It should help to segment them because CTRs and CPCs are both much lower (at least for us) on search partners as compared to the Bing/Yahoo properties.

[BrianBar]

John -

Thank you for the response. We have not considered breaking out our search partners and I think I might give that a try.  I know that there are competitors out their that bid on our search terms regularly and it does drive our CPC up but I have never seen it to this extent.

We currently have the same campaign running in Google and our CPC is 75% less than Bing/Yahoo currently with the same competitors bidding on our terms now.

Thank you for the insight though...I will continue to look at the data and reports and see if I can come up with an explanation as to why this is occurring.

[john4math]

With their reports, you should be able to figure out what's going on and where all this extra traffic is coming from.  Is the extra traffic from Bing/Yahoo, or from their search partners?  From specific queries?  From specific locations?  Maybe a new advertiser is on the scene for a lot of your queries driving the price up?  It's hard to answer that question without digging into the data.

I read this recently from the SEER blog regarding separating Bing/Yahoo from their search partners, and I'm trying it out.  The performance difference between the two for us is large, so I'm hoping this will help!