Most pest control companies don’t even think about Bing Ads.
But if 5-10% of people use Bing, why wouldn’t you want to show up in front of them?
Especially when clicks are 20-30% cheaper than Google.
I run Pest Control SEO, and I’ve set up Bing Ads for dozens of pest control companies. Let me show you the key differences and why this should be part of your marketing stack.
What Are the Key Differences Between Bing Ads and Google Ads?
They are fairly similar, but I will jump into the differences here.
Google Is Much Bigger
Number one, obviously Google is much bigger. They take about 93%, maybe 90% now of the search market.
Whereas Bing Ads, technically they only take about 6%, but they actually own these other companies as well. And these other search engines like Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL and these other companies.
So they actually own those, which actually gives them some more search engine market share.
Bing Has an Older Crowd
Something else to consider there is that Bing typically has an older crowd. So it will be typically people over 35 years old.
And they will also typically be on desktop.
So Google is more mobile and also, something with Google is that they’re directly integrated with every single Apple iPhone.
A lot of people in the US have iPhones. When you just get a new iPhone or whatever, you go on Safari, it is automatically connected to Google. And that’s because they’ve made a deal with Google.
Versus Bing, they are mostly on desktop.
Again, anyone, any of the older crowd, like my dad who searches on AOL, that is going to be, that’s actually part of Bing technically, because Bing owns AOL and DuckDuckGo and Yahoo and these other different search engines.
The Big Three Characteristics
So that’s probably the big three characteristics:
- Bing is much smaller
- It’s an older crowd
- Bing is mostly desktop
Should Pest Control Companies Prioritize Bing?
I don’t think it should be prioritized, but I definitely think it should be part of the marketing stack.
I think a good rule here is whatever we’re doing on Google Ads, which every pest control company should be running Google Ads, I think it is smart and realistic to spend about 10% of our ad spend on Google and put that towards Bing Ads.
That is just kind of how the math works out that Google is about 10 times bigger.
And why not collect all these customers from Bing?
Bing Is Usually Cheaper
And actually something I forgot to mention, I’m glad that this came to mind, is that Bing is also usually cheaper.
There’s usually a lower cost per click because a lot of people aren’t using them.
I went to a conference years ago and I heard someone talking about Bing Ads and they were saying, “It’s a big opportunity or whatever.”
And I was like, “No way, dude. Who uses Bing?”
But regardless, even if 5-10% of people use Bing, why wouldn’t you want to show up in front of them?
And especially for pest control, you want to be targeting homeowners. Those homeowners are in that demographic of usually using desktop and being over 35 years old.
How Does Cost Per Click Compare?
From what I know, Bing usually has about 20 to 30% of a lower cost per click than Google.
So it is noticeably lower.
And again, like I said, it’s because everyone’s using Google.
If you’re thinking about search advertising, you’re thinking about running Google Ads. That might be also local service ads.
Very few people, and especially pest control companies, because pest control is niche, you’ll see software companies doing it, and ecom, and these other industries, and maybe even massive pest control companies.
But for the most part, a lot of people aren’t taking advantage of Bing.
And it’s a supply and demand type of thing. If not many people are using Bing, then it’s going to be cheaper.
Which Pest Control Services Perform Best on Bing?
That’s an it depends one. I don’t think there’s necessarily one that performs best.
And overall, they are still pretty similar to Google Ads in how they perform.
Usually, we’re going to want to target our higher ticket services so we can get a better cost per lead.
Whereas you might be advertising for ant control services, and you’re literally actually losing money on that first service or so.
So that might be something to consider is that we want to target those higher ticket services that we do that high ticket service, so it might be like a termite control job, and then we get them on a recurring service.
How to Measure the Success of Your Bing Ads
There’s many different things we can look at. We kind of talked about this already with Google Ads, which is we need to be looking at the calls coming in.
Just like we should have a different phone number for each of the different campaigns within Google, we should also have a different phone number for each of the campaigns within Bing.
Which I know seems like a big deal. It seems crazy, but really it’s not going to be too much money and it’s going to be totally worth it to see where your leads are coming from.
And just to be completely frank and looking at them, wow, this one campaign generated 20 leads last month and this other one that we’re spending the same money on generated zero.
We need to be looking at that end result, not just necessarily the cost per click or how many people are clicking, how many impressions, but how many leads are we getting?
And let’s put more money towards the ones that are working that still aren’t spending too much money.
The Easy Way to Set Up Bing Ads
Overall with advertising with these, I have two things I want to mention.
One is that Bing Ads are actually much easier than people think to set up because you can go into Bing Ads and if you already have Google Ads set up, then you can, this is crazy, I actually found out about this not too long ago.
You can just import all of your campaigns from Google.
So if you have, this, that’s step one, set up some really great campaigns for your Google Ads, and then you just go in.
And Bing has a really old, not very good looking dashboard, but it still works.
You go in and you import from Google, and you can import all of your same campaigns, but then you can change some things, like I said, of making it about 10% of the budget that you originally had.
Critical: Target the Right Landing Page
Something else I’ll just mention briefly here is that we want to make sure that we’re targeting the right landing page as well.
I’ve seen this as a big problem of people might just send all of their ads to their homepage.
We want to make sure regardless of if it’s Google Ads or Bing Ads, that they’re being sent to the most relevant page.
And ideally, like we’ve also been talking about, you have a completely built out website that has all of these niche pages.
For instance, if we were going to maybe run a Google Ad or a Bing Ad on Bing Ads for pest control, if we were to run an ad towards that, if we had an agency, then we’d want to send that to that exact page on our website.
So it really should be a very targeted page, not just the copy itself, but when people land on the page, then that goes into the conversion aspect.
The Bottom Line on Bing Ads for Pest Control
This isn’t a huge thing that you need to worry about, but if you’re already running Google Ads, literally just import your campaigns from Bing, use about 10% of the budget.
Again, the same principles apply. If you check once a week, at the very least once a month, because it’ll be kind of the same as Google Ads.
So whatever you do to your Google Ads, you’ll probably do most of the same to Bing Ads.
But otherwise that’s it. There’s not too much there.
Spend 10% of your Google Ads budget on Bing. That’s the simple rule.
You get 20-30% cheaper clicks targeting an older, desktop-using demographic of homeowners over 35.
Import your Google campaigns directly into Bing. Change the budget to 10% of what you spend on Google.
Track calls with different phone numbers for each campaign, just like Google.
Target higher ticket services like termite control, not ant control where you lose money on the first service.
Send ads to targeted landing pages, not your homepage.
Bing owns Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and AOL, so you’re reaching more than just Bing users.
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Import your Google campaigns. Set the budget to 10%. Start capturing cheaper leads.
