Seeing is believing, and with welcome visualization improvements to Bing’s ad platform, medical marketers will now have a clearer view of their SEM campaign’s performance.
Despite Google AdWords’ dominance of paid search, Bing remains an essential element in any medical marketer’s toolkit. The combined Bing-Yahoo search network accounts for over 33% of the market share and garnered 132 million health-related searches last year — now that Bing also powers AOL search, the platform presents a formidable alternative to Google’s often more competitive (read: pricier) options. A robust online medical marketing campaign, of course, should contain a mixture of both.
Bigger news is that Bing is piloting new visualization improvements for its ad campaign interface. With new filtering tools and granular controls, medical marketers will gain an improved ability to see the real-time impact and long-term performance of their ad campaigns. And with such features, Bing’s platform will more closely match the capabilities of Google, lending marketers increased cohesion and control across the entirety of their paid ad spend.
A Look Into Campaigns
Bing’s update will enable medical marketers to visualize ad campaign filters, in both grid and graph form, and to add granular precision to the campaign graph timeline. These improvements will apply to Bing Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, and Keywords.
Filtration Control
Performance filters such as click-through-rates (CTRs), impressions, and conversions, including for specific target demographics, can now be applied and viewed as either a grid or a graph. This enables marketers to quickly visualize how campaign changes impact performance over time for specific target areas. For example, you can track how a new messaging tactic impacts a male osteoporosis audience in Tulsa, OK. Marketers can also layer this information with data from Bing’s Share of Voice feature, for instance, giving insight into how performance compares to competitors with similar campaigns. This isn’t just a new way of looking at campaigns, but also of showcasing your successes in an easy-to-digest fashion.
Granular Control
Marketers can also now dilate the timeline on their campaign graphs, viewing performance data in daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly increments. This type of granular control is important, as it allows marketers to closely track real-time campaign changes while keeping their longer-term goals in sight. To note, the graph maxes out at 31 data points (31 days, 31 weeks, etc.), but under normal circumstances, that’s more than a sufficient amount of space.
What This Means for Medical Marketers
Focused on gaining new marketing business, Bing has been busy rapidly bringing its ad capabilities up to speed, and these visualization updates join other improvements announced earlier this year, such as for its Share of Voice and Quality Score features. Indeed, while Bing ads are often considerably cheaper than Google’s — a result of appreciably lower competition — they have historically fallen short of the latter’s reporting capabilities (and sheer audience volume). That’s now an increasingly difficult claim to make.
This is a significant step towards providing the kind of targeting and reporting abilities required by the multifaceted medical campaigns of today. For medical marketers, this signals a newfound ability to tweak their entire ad spends with precision, regardless of platform, across a variety of patient audiences. In other words, marketers will be less bound by the particular limitations of any search platform, and can instead focus their efforts where they will be most effective in attracting new patients and holding onto existing ones.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)
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