It has been announced this week that search engine Bing are to make major changes to their budgeting structure by moving from monthly to daily budgets within their Bing Ads platform. Currently users are able to choose between either daily or monthly ads, but will all soon be migrated to exclusively daily budgets in an attempt to bring the Bing platform into line with their competitors.
The changes will affect the full Bing platform, including mobile apps, Bing Ads online and Bing ads editor, however shared ads will not be affected as these already exclusively use daily budgets.
Bing have reassured users that the changes will improve the platform and have urged customers to move to daily budgets before the April 30th deadline. After April 30th users will be migrated automatically and will no longer be able to access or update budgets in a monthly format.
To help customers adjust, Bing has announced a multiplier of 30.4 to calculate the changes, based on the average number of days in a calendar month. In practice, if users had set a monthly budget of £100, following migration they will then be moved to a budget of £3.28. It’s important to remember that if you have set any Automated Rules, these are all in monthly format and will need to be revised in line with the changes. The changes also make clear that daily ads will be displayed as quickly as “appropriate” meaning they can be targeted to make the most impact. Previously monthly budgets were staggered over the course of the month, regardless of potential conversion opportunities.
The changes bring Bing into line with most other search engine platforms and social media advertising campaigns, including Facebook which allows users to set both a daily budget and a defined end point for ad campaigns, allowing a more precise allocation of advertising revenue.
Although there remains a huge chasm in the revenue stakes between Bing and market leader Google, Bing ads still accounted for over $5bn of revenue for the year ending 2016. By brining ads into line with the industry standard, Bing are hopeful they will begin to close the gap on their more successful competitors.
