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Bing Ads Academy – Bing Ads Reports and How to Tailor Them to Your Optimisation Needs

In this blog we are going to go through the reports available to you through Bing Ads to help you optimise your accounts, and how you can tailor the reports to fit your needs.

The Bing Ads Standard Reports are split into 5 sections:

  • Performance
  • Change History
  • Targeting
  • Campaign Analytics
  • Billing and Budget

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This is the first of two blogs which will cover off the following reports available in the performance, change history and targeting sections. These will be the reports you use most often for optimisation.

  • Search Query Report
  • Website URL (Publisher)
  • Share of Voice
  • Negative Keyword Conflict

In the second of the two blogs we will go through how to adapt the standard performance reports to provide insight into -

  • Ad Extension Click Type
  • Quality Score and Quality Impact
  • Keyword and Landing Page Relevance

All of the reports can be found by navigating to the reports tab in the Bing Ads User Interface. Each report that you run will populate in the UI with the option to then download the report into Excel. Any reports that you have run recently will be stored in the Report History Section.

Once you have selected the report you wish to run, you then select the unit of time, the date range, the time zone and the format you wish the report to be in. The report can be run for all accounts and campaigns, or you have the option to specify the account or campaigns as below. If you select to run an ad group report it would also give the option to choose the ad groups you want in the report.

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As their name suggests the Standard reports are just default reports that we believe you will find useful. The key thing to note with all of our reports is that we allow you to customise them to meet your specific needs. You can do this through the ‘choose your columns’ and ‘filter’ features.

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Once you have customised a report using ‘choose your columns’ and/or ‘filter’ you then have the option to save the report as a custom report under ‘my report settings’. If you choose to save the report as a custom report you can rename it, and schedule it to be run and sent to your email inbox on a particular day of the week, of the month or every day. Once you have saved this custom report it will then be listed in the ‘custom reports’ section of the reports tab ready for when you need it.

All of our standard reports in the performance section will provide you with Impressions, clicks, spend, CPC and CTR data, and you can pull these at keyword, destination URL, ad, dynamic text, ad group, campaign and account level.

Search query report

The search query report is a performance report that shows you which search queries are causing your ads to display on the Yahoo! Bing Network. The search query report includes information on impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and average position for those search queries that have triggered your ads and with this information you can then refine both your keyword and negative keyword lists.

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If you see any search queries in the report that you definitely do not want your ad to appear for you can add these as negatives straight away. For this report we would recommend adding ‘keyword’ as an extra column so that you can see what search queries are matching to your specific keywords. You are also able to add the column ‘Delivered match type’ so you can see which match type is causing your ad to show, allowing you to decide if you should amend any of your broad terms to phrase or phrase terms to exact.

If you see any keywords in the report that you don’t have in your account, but are matching to because of broad or phrase match, we strongly recommend that you do add these keywords with exact match. Exact match keywords tend to have a higher CTR and a lower CPC than phrase or broad match terms, so by adding the terms you are currently broad or phrase matching too as an exact keyword you should see yourself saving money on those terms.

Website URL (publisher) report

When advertising on the Yahoo! Bing Network you have the option to advertise on just Bing and Yahoo! Search owned and operated sites, or owned and operated and syndicated search partner sites. By advertising on both owned and operated, and syndicated search partner sites you will benefit from an increased level of traffic to your website. The Website URL (publisher) report allows you to see which of the syndicated search partners your ads are appearing on, allowing you to evaluate their performance.

If you see any sites from the syndicated search partner network that you think are not performing well enough for you, i.e. not providing you with a good enough CTR, you can then block these sites in the user interface or editor tool. In the user interface you will find the website exclusions option within the campaign settings option. You will need to add one website per line and to exclude an entire domain you just need to leave off the ‘www’ (e.g. contoso.com).

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In the editor tool you will find the website exclusion option within the campaign targeting hub. Again as you do with the UI you should enter one website per line and to exclude a whole domain you just need to leave off the ‘www’.

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We recommend to check the Website URL (publisher) report every month or so to ensure that you are happy with the performance you are receiving from the sites available on the syndicated partner network.

Share of voice report

The share of voice report shows you the impressions we estimate you're losing to competitors because of your budget, keyword bids, keyword relevance, landing page relevance, or current position on search results pages. The report is run at keyword level and provides you with all of the details you need to pinpoint exactly where you need to focus your optimisation efforts. Once you have pulled the report you can graph the results to provide you with an easy-to-view snapshot of the data.

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If your keywords are losing impressions due to budget or bids you can then make the decision of whether you are happy to increase them. Maintaining your rank is key in search advertising - we tend to see that the majority of traffic comes through the top 3 positions, so if you are losing impression share to your competitors through rank it may be worth bidding a little bit higher. If your keyword relevance is causing a loss in impression share, we would recommend you go through and review the keywords, and ad copy related to those keywords, and your account structure. Lastly, if it is your landing page relevance that is impacting your impression share consider reviewing your landing page choice and content to make them more relevant to your ads and keywords.

By working on these particular areas and correcting any areas of concern, you should then see an increase in the number impressions you receive. We recommend checking this report every couple of months to ensure you are always receiving your share of impressions, particularly when you have uploaded new keywords and/or ads into your account.

Negative keyword conflict report

Negative keywords are great for helping to ensure your ads only appear for the most relevant searches. Bing Ads allows you to set negatives in both phrase and exact match. Because of the different match types available, you may find that some of your negatives are actually preventing your ads from appearing on your selected keywords, causing a negative keyword conflict. This may be especially true if you have transferred broad match negatives into your account from a Google AdWords account, as Bing Ads will change these to phrase match negatives.

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The negative keyword conflict report will tell you which of your negatives are preventing your ads appearing for which of your selected keywords. It will also tell you whether your negative keyword conflicts are at campaign or ad group level. To remove a negative keyword conflict, you can either delete the negative or amend the match type associated with it. Removing these negative conflicts will help avoid blocking relevant traffic, and should increase the traffic to your website. We recommend to keep an eye on the conflict report, particularly after you have imported or made changes to your negatives or keywords.

We hope that you find each of these reports and the column customisation feature useful. Look out for next week’s blog when we will cover off how to report on quality score and quality impact, ad extension click type, as well as keyword and landing page relevance.

Other blog posts that appeared in the Bing Ads Academy series:

Bing Ads Academy – Importing your Google AdWords Campaigns into Bing Ads

Bing Ads Academy – Using Device Targeting on your accounts

Bing Ads Academy – Creating and Optimising Sitelink Extensions

Bing Ads Academy – Creating Location Extensions in Your Account