The Next Big Reason to Fully Jump on the Bing Ads Bandwagon? Mozilla Firefox

bing adsBing Ads has been on a strong trajectory for a while now. Platform upgrades, innovation and a departure (in part) from playing catch-up with Google AdWords have helped solidify the case to use Bing Ads. All of that said, Bing Ads’ reach into the search marketplace has been stuck around 30% for a long time when you include Yahoo!’s stats via the Search Alliance. The question on your mind is likely, “then why should we be jumping on the Bing Ads bandwagon now?” Mozilla Firefox. The answer is not search innovation, but a web browser.  

Yahoo! and Firefox

Yahoo! is far from being back at the top of their game, but under Marissa Meyer’s leadership they are making a lot of smart decisions. A rebrand, a dedicated focus on quality content and Yahoo! Gemini (a topic for another time) all are doing wonders for Yahoo!’s position in the search landscape. But their most recent action may prove to be the most important. Yahoo! inked a deal with Mozilla to become the default search engine in the Firefox browser – both on desktop and mobile.

yahoo firefox

image courtesy of searchengineland.com

Internet Explorer is still the unfortunate defacto web browser (though this is likely to change soon with Microsoft’s Spartan). Google’s Chrome browser has an epic foothold in the browser wars and continues to grow both for desktops as well as mobile. But, Firefox is still insanely popular in the U.S., Canada and abroad. Yahoo! becoming the default search engine is HUGE. Unless you are a power user and readily change the default search provider, Yahoo! is it. And your Bing Ads campaigns will be the benefactor of this added traffic flow.

DuckDuckGo and the Syndicated Partner Network

No, I’m not talking about the age-old children’s game. I’m talking about the specialty search engine for privacy control freaks (break out the tinfoil hats!). Mozilla Firefox added DuckDuckGo as a persistent option to the search drop down menu alongside Yahoo!, Bing, Google and Amazon, among others.

duckduckgo

For those of us using Bing Ads’ Syndicated Partner Network, this is truly an added bonus. Many advertisers are finding success here with proper segmentation and vigilant reporting/optimization. One partner that has performed well in the past? DuckDuckGo. Strong bet for a partner that will be seeing positive growth through the end of 2014 into 2015? DuckDuckGo.

Understanding Immediate Impact

Both of these changes occurred right before the bat-****-crazy holiday season where PPC performance for e-comm retailers and everyone else goes haywire. Because of that seasonal effect on everyone’s data, it will be difficult to say whether or not we are already experiencing an uptick in Bing Ads performance from these big Firefox changes.

 

Anecdotally, some of my biggest spending Bing Ads campaigns (non-retail) had very strong performance in December. Not necessarily a big jump in traffic, but an uptick in conversions and conversion rate. I’ll be reviewing data through Q1 2015 to build a before/after data set to better understand the impact these changes have had.

 

Have you seen positive (or negative) Bing Ads performance shifts with these Firefox updates? Please share in the comments!  

John Lee

John Lee

John is an internet marketing jack-of-all-trades with expertise in PPC, SEO, and social media marketing. Working in the search marketing industry since 2006, John spent time at Hanapin Marketing, Wordstream and Clix Marketing before joining Microsoft / Bing Ads in late 2016.

John is also an avid blogger, and has been featured on Search Engine Watch, The SEM Post, ClickZ, Clix Marketing blog, Wordstream blog and PPC Hero. He is also a speaker for SMX, SocialPro, ClickZ Live, HeroConf, Ticket Summit, MN Search Summit, Zenith and State of Search.

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