Blab #18: Google vs Bing PPC

Tom Haslam - (host):

Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional, looking for straightforward non-sales are tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know.

Unknown Speaker - (?):

Hello and welcome back to episode number 18 of the Marketing Labs podcast. For those of you that don't know who I am, I'm Tom Creative director here at Marketing Labs. Today we're diving into the world of pay-per-click advertising or PPC, but with a twist today it's the Battle of the Search Engines, Google versus Bing. So which one's going to give your business the edge in 2024? I'm your host today joined by the dynamic duo, Nick and Matt Janway. Together we're going to unpack the pros, cons, and insider tips on leveraging Google and or Bing for your PPC campaigns. So whether you are allocating your first PPC budget or looking to refine your current strategy, stay tuned as we explore which search engine could be your ticket to the top. How are you doing, Matt?

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Yeah. Good. Yeah, really nice today. So happy. Got golf later.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Nice. I'm looking forward to golf. You're looking forward to

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Too, using my new clubs? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Excellent. I'm looking forward to it too, Nick.

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

Good afternoon.

Tom Haslam - (host):

How are you doing?

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

Good, dynamic duo.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Very dynamic.

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

First time we've been called that I think, isn't it?

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

I wouldn't think that my main attribute is being dynamic.

Tom Haslam - (host):

I'd say you're both very dynamic.

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

I suppose it depends

Tom Haslam - (host):

Which one. From a personality perspective, no, but from a work, no,

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

From a work perspective, yes. I don't often move off my chair though, so I'm not that dynamic in that sense. Yeah,

Tom Haslam - (host):

That's fair enough.

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

Who would be Batman and Robin though? Which one?

Tom Haslam - (host):

Oh, I would say

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

They are the dynamic jewel, aren't

Tom Haslam - (host):

They? Yeah, they are. I'm not sure on that one. I can't pick.

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

No, I don't want to be either.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Anyway, let's crack on. Shall we Google versus Bing then? So I want to start off by asking straight up off the bat if anyone can start. What are the key differences between Google and Bing when it comes to PPC

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

In terms of the platform? They serve the same purpose. Functionally, they're very similar. Obviously they enable people to market across their networks. Actually the look and feel and the purpose and the objectives are very similar. I suppose the biggest difference really is size of audience and reach of audience, especially where you're go multinational. If you going outside of your own country, Google is the far bigger platform. So that really is the main difference between the two.

Tom Haslam - (host):

So just better reach with Google, essentially. They've got better, more

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

People searching so many more as well for Google has anywhere between 90 and 95% of the search market, so 10 to 20 times more searches, but because of that you have more competition. So yes, the audience is bigger, but you also have more competition and that's one of the reasons you can often find really nice performance in Bing because most of your competitors won't be there. So even though the ceiling's lower, there's opportunity.

Tom Haslam - (host):

So I'd say that's probably one of the main reasons why people might overlook Bing or not. They might not be aware of how it works, but are there any other reasons often why Bing gets overlooked compared to Google?

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

I would say that's the main reason, to be honest, typically is people don't think it's worth the time. Either businesses perhaps think they're too big for that platform. There's not enough audience on there, or people that have a lower level of spend maybe want to focus all their spend into Google because obviously when you segment spend, you're not a hundred percent sure whether it's going to work as effectively or not. So I would say a combination of those two really are typically why Bing doesn't see as much ad spend as Google and obviously you will hit the ceiling a lot quicker on Bing. Yeah.

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Also awareness maybe there's probably a little bit of awareness. I think some businesses probably just doesn't even come across their radar. No, it wouldn't be a natural thing for them to think, okay, we can probably get some performance there. Google is, everybody thinks, okay, SEO ads, if I'm doing digital marketing, that along with social media, they're the three areas, whereas yeah, they don't often think about Bing as much. So the ones that do, I think, yeah, absolutely Nick's right there, but I think there's a chunk of people who also don't even think about it.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Although you brought up the Batman and Robin thing, could Google be Batman and Bing could be Robin, although they're not working together, sort of like Robin's on the side sort of thing.

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

I think yeah, definitely. I think the one thing you can definitely say about Bing is more often than not those people that you are reaching on those platform, you're probably not always going to get on Google. So it will definitely extend your reach and they are doing a slightly different job to Batman in that sense. But yeah, both can be effective, I suppose.

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

That's the thing. There's no overlap in audience really. It's not like the people who are using Bing also use Google. They're using Bing probably because they're perhaps forced to in their job. They haven't changed their default search engine, they haven't changed their default web browser. Or they're in a situation where they're working for maybe a council or the NHS or something like that. They usually, there's an audience thing here. They usually slightly less tech literate, probably a bit unfair saying that because it's not entirely, but they often are. So if your audience fits that, it can actually be a very strong thing as well. B2B, it tends to be pretty strong. Some businesses will just, they'll have a Windows machine and it defaults to using Bing and they dunno how to change it. And when they search for something, it searches through Bing.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Interesting one. Have you got, just putting you on the spot, but have you got any examples of the size between, I know you briefly mentioned it when we started, but the size difference between them and Google owns like 95% of the market would you say?

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

Yeah, 90 to 95. So just I guess to put that into some kind of perspective, it's estimated that Bing has around 13 billion searches per month. Oh, really? Globally. So obviously you can multiply that by the percent, can figure out how big Google is. It is enormous in comparison, but 13 billion as well is a lot of searches of people.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Yeah, there's still a massive sort of pot in it, really. Oh

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Yeah, huge. Yeah, still huge. And you could argue, so we talk about earlier on, we mentioned that for some reason Bing isn't necessarily on the radar for people like 13 billion searches. That's not small at all, so it should be on people's radars. That's equally as people might add, throw into the mix. Things like Pinterest or Threads or other platforms like that. Well, if you're throwing them in the mix, Bing is equally as big if not bigger than those.

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

And you think specific to regions as well. So obviously that's globally, but the UK gets 600 million searches. That's a huge amount in the uk, 29 million active users on Bing. So it's a lot of people making a lot of searches. It's definitely not tiny and it's worth considering.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Yeah, definitely. I think what I'm trying to sort get out there to people is that it's an option. It shouldn't be overlooked sort of thing. It could be used both together or Oh, for

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Sure. One dealer actually, there's advantages of using them both together. So if you use Google as a platform to understand performance and analyse what's working and what's not working, because there's more data so you can get access to results quicker. And when I say results, I mean results of analysing data. If you, for example, realise that there's a particular product that's doing extremely well, you can access that data very quickly in Google because of the search volume. Once you know it's working well, there's no reason why it wouldn't work well over Bing. So actually they work very well side by side because you can actually copy things over from Google to Bing, you can physically connect it and pull it over, so you can save yourself a huge amount of manual work. Okay. Audiences probably need adjusting and there's some settings that need changing, but the bulk of the work you can just sink. Yeah,

Tom Haslam - (host):

That's really interesting. So I'm interested to learn if there's any sort of cost comparisons. I know obviously if someone sets a budget on both the same, then they're setting that budget, but is there one that's potentially going to be more cost effective for, let's say a small medium sized business just starting out?

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

It will change. There's nothing really that you can say definitively this is X amount cheaper than the other one. It will depend on your business, it'll depend on your relevancy, your quality scores that you have in your account, your website and that sort of thing. But certainly one of the trends that we're noticing across a lot of clients that advertise on both is that Bing is actually quite a lot cheaper from a cost per click point of view when it's a like for like campaign setup, same keyword, same targeting, et cetera. I thinks probably on average, I think for some of our clients, probably about 70% cheaper.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Do you think that sort of comes back to what Matt said about the bin slightly less competition?

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

Yeah, competition plays a big part in that I think as well, but also I think one of the main reasons for that is especially in the last year to 18 months, Google's really been pushing forward with their automation approach. They want to try and control as much as possible, and I think that when you start to analyse it, that starts to drive up the cost per click. That can be efficient in other ways that might help with conversion rates and return on ad spend. But what you tend to see is that actually the increase in cost per click goes alongside that. So if you don't see the improvement in conversion rates, then you will be driving up your cost because

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Of that. So when you look at the data, the cost per click on Bing is generally quite a lot lower. However, the conversion rate on Google is generally a little bit higher when you combine all of that together. Now every case is going to be different, but when you combine all of that together, what you generally get is around a 20% higher return on advertising spend on being very generalised, but the ceiling is also a lot lower. So a combination of both is generally very much an advantage for most businesses. And I wouldn't look at it like a budget either. It shouldn't be a case of saying, well, we spend X amount of pounds per month on Google, so we don't really have any to put in Bing. Actually, if you're spending money on Google and it's working, spend that money on Bing as well. And it should also work in theory, and you can analyse if it's working and if it's working and it's driving a return on advertising spend, why would you limit it? Because it shouldn't be seen as a budget. It should be seen as an investment. It's almost like a money machine. Put a pound in. If you get five pounds out and you're making profit off that as a business, great. You spend more.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Yeah, I think it comes back to obviously making sure that the campaigns are set up correctly. It is optimised for the audience and the location, the demographics and so on. We've touched on this before. I'm keen to learn from a, I've not necessarily got any experience in this at all, but from a management perspective, how do the interfaces and tools of Google and Bing sort of compare? Is one a steeper learning curve curve than the other? What would you say?

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

They're surprisingly similar, to be honest. They might look a little bit different and how you do certain things might be slightly different in terms of the process across the platforms. But essentially you're doing the same thing in both of those platforms in maybe a slightly different way, but if you are familiar with Google, you will be familiar with Bing. It's kind of intuitive in that way. The only thing really that's different between the two small differences I think is in and around the audiences. So Microsoft has access to LinkedIn data, for example. So you can typically target people better based on their company that they work for or their industry or potentially their job title and that sort of thing. So that's a little bit better integrated. You can set audiences up slightly differently from an ad group level as well, which you can't do in Google. It's done at campaign level. So there are subtle differences essentially doing the same thing. And if you know one, you'd be pretty familiar with the other.

Tom Haslam - (host):

You've sort of touched on this in your last question, but are there any unique features in Bing that Google doesn't offer or vice versa? Not

Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):

Really, no. You tend to find that they both borrow good ideas from each other. So one of them might release something first and actually it works or it does a good job, or the other person may be playing catch up, the other platform is playing catch up. But actually the various subtle differences between the two, you might do something in a slightly different way, or it might have a slightly different output or process. But largely speaking, they are a similar product that look ever so slightly different.

Tom Haslam - (host):

It's really interesting to learn actually, because I think from various conversations that we've sort of had with clients is that they immediately go to Google, don't they? Because that's the more prominent search engine. It's an option. But actually a few clients where we have implemented Bing ads, they've performed really well, which is very well,

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Very, very

Tom Haslam - (host):

Well is quite important obviously to get that performance. But getting straight down to tips and advice. Are there any recommendations that you can give to maybe not a startup, but a established business maybe when it comes to Google versus Bing? Can we get a definitive answer here, where to

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Go? Well, I think my first piece of advice would be if you are already using Google Ads, absolutely. You should also be using Bing as long as if it's working for you, if it's generating a return on advertising spend, you should also be using what you've learned from Google and pulling that over into Bing ads. Even if all you do is pull the best performing campaigns over, you should be doing something in there really because you're just missing out. If not, if you are not running Google Ads yet, then there's an argument for both. Initially, you have to think of it like a budget because it's not going to be generating anything. So the thing is, if you are of the mindset of actually gathering data is going to be extremely useful to then optimise the campaigns out, then you probably did ought to start at Google because you're going to gather that data so much quicker. However, if that's less of an issue for you, then Bing is still a very good opportunity because generally at least the cost per clicks are lower, and the return on advertising spend generally, again, is a little bit higher. So it could be a good place to start.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Awesome. I don't think I've got any other questions that I want to ask to be honest. I think you've both covered it very well, which thanks. Makes sense. I mean, you do it every day. Nick and Matt, you've got lot's. Good.

Matt Janaway - (CEO):

Listen today. Yeah, nice and easy to soak up. It is not too consuming for people's time, but actually there's still some very valuable information.

Tom Haslam - (host):

Yeah, good takeaways. Basically don't overlook Bing. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Nick.

Unknown Speaker - (?):

And that's a wrap on our Google versus Bing PPC showdown. We dissected everything from audience differences to cost efficiency, platform features, or with the help of our experts, Nick and Matt. The takeaway, whether it's Google's vast reach or Bing's niche advantages, the right choice varies by your business's needs and goals. That's the most important thing. But don't forget, PPC is all about knowing your audience and making data-driven decisions. So whether your team Google, team Bing, or playing both sides, aim for smart strategy led campaigns. Thank you to Nick and Matt for their insights and to you, our listeners for joining us on Marketing Labs. If you've got a PPC story or question, feel free to hit us up on social or our emails, ask@marketinglabs.co at uk. Until next time, keep optimising and see you soon.