Advertising

Skip to main content
Advertising

Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today >

Microsoft Advertising Blog
Page 1 of results

Stay ahead of the pack with the Competition tab

Knowing the competitive landscape is critical to staging a successful ad campaign, but it's often difficult to understand which competitors’ ads appear before yours, and why. Furthermore, deciding what actions you should take to stay ahead can be daunting.

With our new Competition tab—now available globally—Bing Ads helps you quickly get valuable insights on these competitors. We also do analysis using machine learning to find areas of opportunity within your campaigns and recommend optimisations you can implement. This will help you save time and become more confident about the decisions you're making for your business.

Watch this video for a quick overview of the Competition tab:

Analyze your competition with Auction Insights

The competition tab has two sections. The first section is Auction Insights. We took the Auction Insights report and completely revamped it with richer visualizations, including the ability to segment the data using metrics such as time or device, as well as filter down to specific competitors or campaigns.

Let’s say you're managing ad campaigns for a tour and travel company. With the Over Time view, you can instantly understand the competitive trend. For example, in the chart below, you can see that your top competitor used to be contososuites.com but recently fabrikamresidences.com has gained some steam. You can also see that a new competitor  (margiestravel.com) popped up out of nowhere and is getting around 98% impression share.

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab auction insights dashboard, over time view.

You can drill down to see where exactly your ads are showing by segmenting the data by device type.

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab auction insights dashboard, data by device type view.

By segmenting the data by day of the week, you can quickly see that your competition is beating you with significant margin almost every day of the week except for Tuesdays, where the race is close.

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab auction insights dashboard, data by day of the week view.

You can even slice the data by hour of the day to optimise your campaigns at a more granular level.

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab auction insights dashboard, data by hour of the day view.

If you want to see data only for specific competitors, simply filter on the domains in which you're interested.

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab auction insights dashboard, filtered by domain view.

Want to focus on specific campaigns or ad groups? You can easily filter on specific campaigns or ad groups.

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab auction insights dashboard, filtered by campaign view.

Helpful hint: To see Auction Insights data for a specific set of keywords, go to the Keywords tab, select the keywords that you're interested in, then go to Details, then Auction Insights, then Selected.

Optimise your campaigns with help from Recommendations

Now that you've done some analysis in the Auction Insights section, the next question is: What action should you should take? This is when the Recommendations section comes in, where Bing Ads uses machine learning to find aspects of your campaigns that you can adjust to help stay ahead of the competition. For each recommendation, Bing Ads presents insights on What's happening and What you can do—and we let you know what outcome you can expect.

In this release we focus on seven recommendation areas (see examples below):
  1. Bid more competitively on keywords
  2. Optimise your campaign device targets
  3. Fix campaigns that are limited by budget
  4. Optimise your campaign location targets
  5. Target new locations
  6. Expand your reach
  7. Add similar keywords
Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab recommendations, Bid more competitively on keywords and Optimize your campaign device targets views.
Recommendations: Bid more competitively on keywords and Optimize your campaign device targets

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab recommendations, Fix campaigns that are limited by budget and Optimize your campaign location targets views.
​Recommendations: Fix campaigns that are limited by budget and Optimize your campaign location targets

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab recommendations, Target new locations and Expand your reach views.
​Recommendations: Target new locations and Expand your reach

Product view of Bing Ads Competition tab recommendations, add similar keywords view.
​Recommendations: Add similar keywords

We're excited to roll out these new AI-powered capabilities and we hope you find them valuable in growing your business. Explore the Competition tab and see what it can do to help you keep your business ahead of the pack.

Let us know your thoughts

For any questions or feedback on this new feature, we encourage you to reach out to your Bing Ads account manager. You can also ping us on Twitter, suggest a feature on the Bing Ads Feature Suggestion Forum, or send your thoughts to bingads-feedback@microsoft.com.