Bing Ads for Education
Curious if Microsoft Ads can work for your school or college? So were we! Check out our fairly conclusive case study.
Bing Ads was launched by Microsoft in mid 2009. For much of that time, Bing struggled to gain relevance, wide adoption, and search engine market share.
Then … AI happened 🤖⚡️
Microsoft made a splash by announcing it would incorporate AI features into their user search experience. After beating Google to the AI arena, Bing makes up nearly 11.2% of Desktop Search Engine Market Share Worldwide:
And the users Bing has attracted may perhaps change the way you think about the average Bing user:
Microsoft’s rapid growth, shifting user demographics, and promise for the future made us at Little Foxes Marketing curious: do Bing Ads work for education?
The Test
Little Foxes Marketing performed a test with an undergraduate college partner in Massachusetts, where 6 search campaigns were run on both Google and Microsoft simultaneously. The campaigns were identical in terms of targeting, keywords, ad content, landing pages, etc. The campaigns did not include branded keywords.
The Results
Microsoft outperformed Google. And it wasn’t even close:
Our client’s Microsoft Ad Cost Per Click was 10 times cheaper than Google
Microsoft Ad users were engaged on the website for over 3 times as long
Perhaps the best part?
Microsoft paid traffic’s average onsite engagement time (orange line) was higher than the client’s organic search traffic (blue line), which is usually the gold standard for traffic quality.
We’ve been managing digital marketing campaigns on behalf of colleges and schools for years, and we were blown away by these results. Our client was able to drive a targeted user to its site for $0.11 per click, and that user averaged nearly 80 seconds of engagement time on the site. Engagement time includes when the user is scrolling 90% of the page, visiting multiple pages, downloading items, clicking on videos, filling forms, converting, etc.
LFM’s Recommendation
More impressions, more clicks, higher engagement, with less spend.
We strongly recommend providing your digital partner with some budget (it won’t take much) and testing Microsoft ads for your institution. In addition to everything above, you will encounter less competition from other schools and organizations. Although, it’s a safe bet that all LFM clients will be on Microsoft next year.