The Time to Transition to Bing Shopping Campaigns Is Now

The option to upgrade to the new Bing Shopping Campaigns format has been available for a few months, but Bing Ads has yet to set a hard date to make the transition. While that means you still have time to wander in that direction, I recommend that you make the transition sooner rather than later.

Traffic Is Already Moving

The new shopping campaigns are increasing in traffic volume and becoming more preferred for serving in the SERPs. However, this can be difficult to see without access to multiple Bing Ads accounts. In addition to the new campaigns having a better structure, performance is also following suit. Basically, each idle day spent waiting to make the transition is potentially costing you revenue.

Already, there is more than double the traffic in the volume of impressions and clicks month-over-month, compared to CTRs, and with a slightly higher CPC. It initially took some time for search queries to display an option to add negative keywords, but now that they are currently available, this should help bring down the CPC and bring up CTRs.

Bing Product Ads Campaigns (31 days):

Bing Shopping Campaigns (14 days):

Given the current rate, the average number of clicks per day is 209. The old Product Ads campaign resulted in 45 clicks per day.

Of course, your next question is, “Did revenue and conversions go up too?”

The answer is yes. Conversions and revenue increased by nearly double. Now, if we could only get the overall volume compared to a certain other channel…

Make the Transition

I’ve already written about best practices for making the transition. Here’s a quick hit list:

1. Name your new campaigns accordingly – something like “BSC – Name or Shopping.”
2. Adjust your outgoing feed to include the new attributes: custom labels zero through four, and remove the Grouping and Label attributes.
3. Create and import your new Shopping Campaigns, and run them concurrently with your old Product Ads campaigns.
4. Set the new campaigns as high priority and the old Product Ads campaigns as low.
5. Turn down the bids so that they are lower on the old Product Ads campaigns, but don’t turn them off.
6. Set the bids in your new Shopping Campaign as higher than anything in the old Product Ads campaigns.
7. Let both types of campaigns run until the new Shopping Campaign starts to pick up at least 80 percent of the traffic.
8. Once the new Shopping Campaign does pick up 80 percent or more of the traffic, pause the old Product Ads campaigns.
9. Your new campaigns may take up to 48 hours to start garnering traffic, so be sure to leave the Product Ads campaigns on during this time.
10. In All Products, set the campaigns or product groups to the lowest overall bid.
11. Don’t forget to utilize negative keywords in your new Shopping Campaigns.

Chances are, you’ve already gone through a similar exercise last year when you transitioned from Google Product Listing Ads Campaigns to Google Shopping Campaigns. Many of those same principles also apply here. If you have a smaller account with less than 15 shopping campaigns, it could make more sense to import these directly from Google into Bing. In my experience, a full-blown import of more than 15 campaigns can be excessive, and performance is much better with a less granular structure – at least for the time being.

Happy transitioning!