When it comes to law firm marketing, Bing matters more than you might think.
One immediate advantage is that Internet Explorer and Bing Ads are both owned by Microsoft, and Bing is the default search engine for Internet Explorer.
Bing search is installed into Windows 10, Windows Phone, Xbox, MS Office and Cortana (Microsoft’s Siri-like virtual assistant).
Bing also powers searches on Yahoo! along with all internet connected cars and trucks from Ford. Cars connected to the internet are here, and the number of connected cars is only going to be going up in the coming months and years.
Because Microsoft has integrated Bing search in so many of their devices,
Bing is popular among those who are not tech advanced.
With Bing/Yahoo! a law firm can instantly increase their advertising reach by up to 35+% with an additional 150+ million users.
Don’t think Google or Bing. Think Google and Bing if your budget allows it. If you’re a young firm trying to make a mark in the world, Bing Ads may be your best strategic move into marketing your firm online with a limited budget.
Google used to dominate PPC marketing for law firms at higher than 80% market share a few years ago, and is now at a 65-68% market share, according to an August 2014 comScore U. S. Search Engine Rankings Report. With most of the remainder divided up between Bing and Yahoo!.
In October 2015, comScore reported that Google dropped to 63.9 percent, Bing rose to 20.7 percent, and Yahoo! jumped to 12.7 percent. While Google only dropped a few percentage points, Bing’s jump is a pretty substantial 20-percent increase in market share and rising.
Google Settings Force You to Spend More Money
Google AdWords forces you to set your network, location, ad scheduling, language, and ad rotation settings at your campaign level and your ad groups are restricted to Google’s campaign-level settings.
Bing AdCenter opens these options up at the ad group level, allowing you to quickly adjust settings for an ad group without having to go through the hassle of creating a brand-new campaign to make changes.
In August 2015, Google ended their “exact and phrase match keywords” feature, as we marketers used to know them. Google forced an option called, “close variant”, which matches targets onto all AdWords accounts. Close Variants (‘Pure’ Exact Match) gave advertisers the added reach of exact keywords and phrase keywords by an estimated 7% by including common misspellings, plurals, and grammatical stemmings of these phrases and exact match keywords.
Although Bing Ads does have the option to include close variant queries as matches, it remains just that: an option. Advertisers can easily opt in or out of close variant matching at the ad group level and campaign level.
Google offers PPC advertisers 2 choices at the campaign level: target Google search, or target Google search and search partners. There is no in between or alternative choice. You cannot just target specific search partners and exclude a particular search partner. You cannot even see which partner engines are driving traffic to your site. Bing Ads allows you to block content search partners by adding their IP address or website URL to their exclude options.
Bing Ads allows you to import your entire Google AdWords account. Bing Ads allows PPC advertisers the flexibility of targeting just Bing & Yahoo!, just search partners, or both, at the ad group level where it matters.
Bing customer service is also very helpful and will spend time with small firms that spend at least $500 a month. Google’s customer service will not even talk to you unless you spend a minimum $500,000 a year, (last I checked), which is an entirely different strategic game of paid advertising.
