4 Best Practices for Search Beyond Google

Google versus Bing. While they may be duking it out for market share, these two search engines can actually go really well together as part of your overall online marketing portfolio.

According to an October comScore report, Google held 67% market share of searches in the US, while Bing accounted for 18%. Year-over-year, Google's search share has remained flat while Bing's has actually grown. If advertisers were to address this logically, they would invest search budget proportionally across these two search engines. However, we often find that advertisers under-invest in Bing, both in terms of budget and time managing/optimizing their accounts.

Crunch all the numbers over here in our full-length write-up, but advertising proportionally on Bing can provide a big boost to your total clicks for no additional spend. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Start with what you know. Marin makes it easy to replicate your Google accounts in Bing. Simply change the account name, export from "Google" to "Bing," and then upload. This will take about 10 minutes, provide full coverage across both search engines, and ensure up-to-date and fully optimized ad copy.
• Evaluate your maximum CPC bids. It may be necessary to lower these, as CPCs are lower on Bing versus Google.
• Use historical data. Take advantage of your Google keyword performance data in the event that the Bing keywords have no historical data. To do this in Marin, add the Bing keywords to the same Folder where the Google keywords reside.
• Edit across publishers. Using Marin, optimize keywords from both Google and Bing in the same user interface. Consider setting automated alerts to identify when keywords are under-performing, regardless of which search engine account they belong.