Microsoft Advertising Suite
One of the most often overlooked, yet powerful digital marketing platforms that is out there is Microsoft’s advertising suite of tools. Microsoft has historically branded under their search engine brand, Bing, however, lately they’ve been including Microsoft into the name more recently.
The platform that generally steals the limelight, Google, has a popular set of tools that marketers would find nearly impossible to separate themselves from. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the tools available through Microsoft/Bings platform, understand how they compare to Google’s and answer questions like, “Should I Bother With Bing?”
Microsoft’s Bing Search:
Bing Ads:
Bing Ads provides a business owner with paid advertising opportunities in the US’s 2nd most popular search engine (the obvious 1st going to Google), as well as Microsoft’s expansive Audience Network. Bing Ads operates very similar to Google Ads. Where it lacks in certain items like YouTube inventory and Gmail ads, it makes up with direct access to some of Microsoft’s owner operated platforms.
Webmaster Tools:
Microsoft/Bing Webmaster Tools, similar to Google Search Console (previously called Google Webmaster Tools), provides a business owner with insights to their organic performance on Microsoft/Bing Search.
The above is probably not making the best case for utilizing Bing Search and Bing Webmaster Tools, however, some of the supporting tools available on Bing Webmaster Tools are quite useful.
Here are quite a few features that Bing Webmaster Tools provides, that others do not have. Webmaster Tools provides a lot of insights into SEO, better controls over your website visibility and others.
Google provides some of these features but others are absent or are on disparate platforms so you’re maneuvering to multiple different platforms to do the same job.
The main benefit of the tools from Bing Webmaster tools is how forthcoming they are and often times are more so than their Google counterparts. To compound this benefit, some SEO functions are universal across both Bing and Google search, so these lessons learned on Bing, end up supporting your Organic presence on Google. Win-win.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is Microsoft/Bing’s website analytics tool. Packed full of new terms like Quick Backs, Rage Clicks, Excessive Scrolling, and Dead Clicks, Microsoft Clarity provides a new or added perspective on a website’s performance.
Microsoft Clarity also helps to understand user behavior on the website through aggregate heatmap tracking and individual screen recordings. These two components allow a business, organization or webmaster to understand aggregate traffic and narrow down to individual users. Broad-base interpretation and individual diagnostics all in one platform.
