Bing has annouced the rollout of three new features shopping campaigns this week, as reported over at Search Engine Land. These updates are as follows:
Inventory update feeds
Probably the most useful of the three, this new functionality means it will no longer be necessary to update the entire Bing shopping feed every time a product goes out of stock, or you make a price change. Instead, it will be possible to make supplemental feeds available, either via an upload of FTP (automatic, or manual).
Scheduling feed downloads
In a move that mimics functionality already available within Google Shopping, advertisers will now be given the opportunity to schedule precisely when their feeds will be picked up by Bing. This will mean that it will be possible, for example, to choose the time of day and how frequently feeds are picked up. This should be good news in terms of server load and the scheduling of other background jobs. For those who prefer to run feed uploads manually, it will continue to be possible to do so.
Search queries at the product level
Want to know which search queries are triggering the display of your product inventory? The addition of new reporting will make this possible, allowing greater insight into the performance of your Bing shopping campaigns.
Our thoughts
The biggest problem for Bing in the UK remains the relatively small product share. Advertisers are often wary of putting too much time into Bing shopping campaigns. However, competition is more limited than within Google Shopping as a result, which does open up some great opportunities. The additional functionality that is being outlined here can only be positive.
Demographic targeting within Google
One of the features that we love within Facebook is the ability to target ads by demographics. This means that the news that Google have rolled out similar functionality must be a good thing. Although the targeting options are relatively limited at this point (to age, gender and parental status), it’s likely that this will be just the start of Google’s plans within this area.
In order to make use of the new functionality, you can navigate to the Audiences tab and then select Demographics, before implementing bid adjustments. There is a word of warning here, however: there will be many users where Google is unable to identify the age, gender or parental status. Take great care when applying settings that you don’t exclude this group of “unknowns”, as doing so could dramatically limit the reach of your advertising.