Bing’s Basket of Deplorables

It’s hard to resist a meme. So let’s commandeer the Basket of Deplorables discussion in the American Presidential campaign for a look at the demographic difference between Google’s user audience and that of Bing.

What difference?

According to Comscore, the US search market is shared 64% by Google, 21% by Bing and 12% by Yahoo. It’s more than the size of those shares that make them different. It’s also their demographics. Depending on your target market, you may want to read this carefully.

To summarize, the vast majority of Bing searches occur in the US vs. Google’s more global footprint. Bing’s users are also typically older, less techy and more blue collar than Google’s user base. Perhaps most importantly for you, less competition on Bing also means lower costs. Back in 2014 there was a 71% difference in the average cost per click for the two engines. The gang at Aborg put together a nice summary table of the key differences in 2014. The cost difference between the two engines may be shrinking – this year Adshark suggests the delta is 50%.

Courtesy of Aborg circa 2014.

Put another way, if you’re interested in speaking to older and less nerdy Americans at lower prices – you should take a look at Bing. That doesn’t mean Bing’s audience, or even half of it, belongs in a “basket of deplorables”, to quote a famous presidential candidate, but you could infer there’s a higher proportion of Bing users in one candidate’s camp than the other.

Why the difference?

One reason for the demographic difference between engines comes down to which engine – and browser – is included with your OS. Windows includes Internet Explorer, or Edge, both of which use Bing, by default. If you’re not the kind of person who downloads your favourite browser and chooses your favourite search engine as soon as you get a new system, you may be a Bing user…but you’re not necessarily deplorable.

No more barriers to PPC platform entry

In the past you or your agency may have been reluctant to double your ppc advertising effort for 20% more results. But that’s no longer the case. Bing, playing the Pepsi to Google’s Coke, has made it easy – very easy – to clone your AdWords program on Bing in minutes. Moreover, if you or your agency use a bid management platform to aggregate ad platforms, you don’t need to worry about synching and optimizing your campaigns on different platforms either.

The last deplorable word

If you’re already on AdWords, I have a deal for you! I can grow your market by a fifth and I can get it for half of what you would pay to grow your current market. Finally, it’s not hard to get or maintain. Interested? If you’re happy with your AdWords results, there aren’t many programs that couldn’t do even better by including Bing too.

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