You will find countless articles that say how bad the Syndicate Search Partners are with Bing Ads. All of these articles will tell advertisers to stay away from this network if they can. I would like to share how I found success with this network and how you can find it too! As a note, my KPI’s were to have a low CPC and a similar CPA to traditional Bing traffic. Lets start with what I did to see fantastic results!
Who are the Partners on Bing Ads?
There are hundreds if not thousands of partners. Some of the big names to know are DuckDuckGo, Amazon, MapQuest, Forbes, SwagBucks, Bloomberg, and more. There are many small names too, but those are the most noticeable for the majority of people.
Here is an example of what your Bing Ad will look like on a partner site.
How do I opt into this network?
To make this change fast, you can use Bing Ads Editor. You need to set this network preference at the ad group level. As a note, you can select all of your ad groups and change this where it says network distribution.
I would run this as a test if you are new to this network. Run this for a campaign/s that are generic and receive a lot of traffic. A good idea is to run it for a branded campaign for your company name. If you run the test for a very specific campaign without a lot of traffic, you might not get the data you need to fully measure the results.
How do I Pull a Website URL Report in Bing Ads?
Head over to the Reports tab and look for Website URL report on the left side. You can change the units of time to anything you would like. Depending on the size of your business, you should wait until you have a few hundred clicks to get an idea on how things are progressing with this network.
One key thing to remember is to include the Networks column in this report so you can see the split in traffic from Bing, AOL, and the search partners.
How do I Read the Website URL Report?
Take all the data in Excel and immediately put it into a pivot table. Before filtering for the partners, let’s view everything from a high level to see how this network performs in relation to AOL, Bing and Yahoo. From there, you can view the Syndicate Partners and view metrics like clicks and impressions. Since this is a pivot, you want to manually add calculations to this. Things that I add are the click-through rate, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend if you track conversions uniquely (or if a conversion is worth the same).
This is a view of the syndicate search partners on Bing. Scroll down a bit further to see how this performs with AOL and Bing.
With this Pivot, I can add metrics like the website URL to see how each site performs for this account. This allows me to see what websites I should exclude from my account which I can do in Bing Ads Editor.
How to Exclude Websites?
Based on the Excel report, you can exclude websites to not serve your ads. You can do this either in the UI or Editor. I suggest Editor because you can make changes in bulk. Head to the edit button at the top of editor and look for exclude websites. From there, you can add any websites you want to block and apply it to 1, 2, 3, or all of your campaigns if you feel that makes sense. As a note, you can block certain ad groups instead of the entire campaign if it makes sense for your business.
Success with the Syndicated Partners Network in Bing Ads
So I want to share the success I’ve seen with this network. First thing I notice is that my impressions went from 21k to around 10k or so a week. This was due to the websites I did not want to serve my ads. Second, my CPC as a network was low like AOL search and Bing + Yahoo. A low CPC is great, but what about the CPA for the conversions I get from it? Take a look at the arrow at the picture below. After a few weeks of dropping websites, you can see the CPA went from $40 to $11. This CPA is now level with AOL Search and Bing and Yahoo.
I see this network as a huge win. Bing traffic converts high for this website, so to drive more quality traffic from it is always a goal of mine,
Conclusion
The big thing I have to stress is patience with this test. Bing will not be your top priority every week for your business. However, I see that as a tremendous opportunity because that is the story for everyone. If you take time to create the test, exclude sites that don’t work for your business, and track the changes, I believe you will see better results than the first few weeks.