How to Use Bing Shopping Ads

At Web 2 Market, we’re crazy about Magento. But we’re especially crazy about our clients and helping their e-commerce businesses thrive. That’s why we’re taking this opportunity to tell you about this inexpensive advertising opportunity using Bing Shopping Ads.

Bing Product Search

Seems like merchants are always looking to sell more. But they frequently overlook easy and free ways to promote their products. Another example is Bing Product Search. While Google is the 800 pound gorilla, Bing generates sizeable traffic and is growing. It only takes a couple hours to set up an account, generate a product feed, and start generating traffic and sales.  Therefore, you will sell more if you add Bing Product Search to your tool set. Here’s an example of how search results look in Bing.  Most noteworthy, notice the product ads to the right of the organic search results.

In this post, we’ll walk through the process of setting up a feed from your site to Bing.  Next, we’ll optimize the display within the search results, and configure the account within Bing. We’ll explain the differences between free and paid advertising options.  Finally, we’ll also let you know what you can’t submit to Bing Product Search.

First Create a Feed to Submit to Bing Shopping Ads

The first step is to create a feed to submit to Bing. The feed is a CSV file that includes the product data they’re looking for. If you’ve got only a few products, you can use Excel to create the file using the format found here.

But, if you’re like most merchants, you’ll have hundreds or thousands of products.  In addition, you’ll also want to automate the process so daily updates happen automatically. If that’s the case, use a 3rd party extension. Here are a couple good ones:

http://store.web2market.com/Bing-Shopping-Product-Feed-P140.aspx (for AbleCommerce)

http://www.extendware.com/magento-extensions/revenue-drivers/magento-product-feed.html (for Magento)

Once you or your developer has installed the plugin/extension, you’ll be ready to submit the feed file. The next step is to configure your Bing account to accept the feed file (if you don’t yet have a Bing account, create it here.)

How to Create a New Product Ad Campaign

After creating a feed to submit to Bing and configuring your Bing Shopping Ads account, you are ready to create a new product ad campaign. To create a campaign, follow these steps:

1. First of all, create a new Product Ad Campaign.

2. You’ll be prompted to create a store.

3. Select your store.

4. From within your Store settings, add a description and check the Product Ads and Rich Captions check boxes and save.

5. From within Catalog Settings, note the Source URL. This file location on your site will also need to match the location of the feed file.  This was created by the extension/plugin installed in the step above.

6. Next return to the Campaigns tab within Bing Shopping Ads. Choose Create Campaign and Product Ad Campaign again. There are many options you can select as you create campaigns, but for your first campaign, let’s keep it simple. Fill in a Campaign Name, Extension name (like All Web 2 Market Extensions, for all our products), some minimal bid, and Promotional Text (e.g. Excellent Magento Extensions!). Finally, click Save, and you’re done!

7. Finally, an optional piece is to get your products displaying, and highlighted, within the organic results. Here’s an example:

Note the blue text, price, and availability listed within the organic results. Getting this seems pretty easy: Just install the free extension found here. That’ll give Bing the extra data it needs to highlight your products in the organic results.

Items Bing Product Search Will Not Accept

Finally, there are some products Bing won’t accept:

• alcohol
• Also Deceptive products and services
• Drugs and related paraphernalia
• Also, fireworks and explosives
• feeding
• In addition, tobacco and electronic cigarettes
• Finally, weapons, knives, firearms, and ammunition

Bing Product Search is Worth the Effort

It’s a couple hours of work, but once in place, your product ad campaign will run and keep generating traffic and sales. There’s no time like the present to take advantage of this advertising opportunity! Finally, if you need help setting this up on your Magento site, contact our Magento and AbleCommerce experts today.  We’ll help you set up Bing Product Search for your business, because you want to sell more!