8 Steps for Getting Started with Bing Shopping Campaigns

Bing Shopping campaigns have gone through a few changes these last few months and are now becoming even more crucial for small businesses (especially e-commerce).

A great feature that many are just now starting to try is actually importing Google Shopping campaigns into Bing Shopping campaigns for added exposure. Although they may not bring in as much revenue as Google might, Bing is still the third largest search engine and can hold its own when it comes to a user-base.

If you’re looking to get more involved with Bing this year, this is a great place to start.

A Little Background on Bing Shopping Campaigns

Believe it or not, the latest type of Bing product ad campaigns was not used until March 2014. The new Bing Shopping campaigns allow advertisers to structure their campaigns and bids in the same way as Google Shopping campaigns.

Unfortunately, not everyone thinks that setting up Bing Shopping campaigns is overly simple, as discussed in this article. Therefore, Internet Marketing Ninjas has listed a few things you should do before getting started so that you’re prepared:

• Make sure you get your column headers correct. You can do this manually or using a feed management platform (such as Feedonomics), which you can learn more about on the Bing Shopping feed specs page here.
• You can submit the feed to the Bing merchant center once your headers are in place.
• You can only have one data feed per account, but you can upload it multiple times a day. This is great if you have prices that change or your availability changes often.
• Bing uses Bing Ads Labels as opposed to the different categories that Google supports.

Keep in mind that Product Ads are not for everyone, and I would recommend working with Google first so that you can import your data. Visit this article to learn more about Google Shopping campaigns, what has changed, and what you need to be successful.

How to Get Started on Bing Shopping Campaigns

SEER Interactive wrote a great article detailing the steps to setting up a Bing Shopping campaign. Below are some of those steps along with tips mentioned on the official Bing Shopping campaigns page:

• Visit the Bing Merchant Center and click “Create Store.”
• Verify your URL on Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Choose your campaign type. Choose whether you’re creating a Search & Content campaign or a product ad campaign (for the purposes of this article, we’ll choose the latter!).
• Create your product extension. This is where you will setup the name of your campaign, locations, language, budget, and then the product extension, or the store name and product information.
• Include a product target. You have the choice of All Products or Filtered Products.
• Create the promotional text for your product ad.
• Create different ad groups, which again includes the name, language, and location for your target market. You can then select your ad type and include any promotional text.
• Get into filtering options. This is where you can choose different groupings for your ads, monitor your budget, etc. Bing will even tell you if there are any matching products that match all of the information you provided.

In the end, it’s ultimately about giving it a try and seeing where your Bing Shopping campaigns can go. Once you get a feel for how the system works, you can get more advanced and try improving your Bing efforts.

Although this interface is different than Google, going through the steps can help you see how it work quickly and easily. I recommend checking out the following video from Bing to get step-by-step instructions:

Republished by permission. Original here.

Images: Video Stills

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