Bing Shopping: a 4-Step Quick-Start Guide

By Jarod Reynolds, SEM Account Manager

The Shopping campaign format has been available within Bing Ads for a few months now. The new format offers enhanced control of your campaigns through the use of product groups and new campaign priority settings, much like Google Shopping.

Let’s walk through how to get up and running with Bing’s new campaign type.

1.    Verify your Domain

Before creating a product catalog in Bing Merchant Center, you’ll need to verify that you own the domain where the products live.

In the Bing UI under Tools, select Bing Merchant Center and find the link to Bing Webmaster Tools:

Once in the Bing Webmaster Tools UI, click Verify Now to be taken to a page explaining your options for verification:

Bing offers 3 options to verify your domain, all of which are outlined in detail after clicking Verify Now.

• Place an XML file on your web server
• Copy and paste a <meta> tag in your default webpage
• Add CNAME record to DNS

2.    Create Your Bing Merchant Center Store

In Bing Merchant Center, click Create Store.  Enter your store name, URL and description.  All Bing Ads Merchant Stores must have SSL log-in and checkout pages. URLs that start with https: rather than http: and have a lock icon in the browser are secured with SSL. Verify this by checking Yes next to SSL Checkout to keep your store from being rejected.

3.    Create Your Product Catalog

Bing product catalogs must be tab delimited plain text file types (.txt, .zip, .gz, .gzip, .tar.gz, .tgz). Feed specifications can be found here.

Within your store, navigate to the Catalog Management tab and select Create Catalog:

1. Enter your catalog name
2. Select the location you’d like the target with these products
3. Select a delivery method for your product feed
   1. Automatic Download – Identify a file location where Bing should look for your product feed (currently updates 1x a day)
   2. Upload file using FTP – Upload a file directly to Bing’s FTP (The look for an updated file every 15 minutes)
   3. Manually Upload – Manually upload a file (must be under 4MB)
4. Enter the filename of your product feed:

4. Build Your Campaigns

You’ve got two options here; you can import your AdWords campaigns or build new ones within Bing.

Import Campaigns from Google AdWords

In most cases, marketers who are moving into the Bing Shopping space already have a presence on Google Shopping. Bing has made it extremely easy to import your shopping campaigns from Google in just a few steps.

1. In the Bing Ads UI,select Import Campaigns, then Import from Google AdWords:
2. Select the Google Shopping campaigns you’d like to import
3. Continue
4. Select the Bing Merchant Center account you’d like to associate with these campaigns
5. Import

Build a New Bing Shopping Campaign

In some cases you may not have Google Shopping campaigns to clone, or you’d like to use a different structure for your Bing campaigns. Building a shopping campaign from scratch is very simple. Within the Bing UI navigation to Campaigns < Create Campaign and select Shopping Campaign.

The majority of the campaign settings are the same as a search campaign, but there are a few that are specific to shopping.

• Campaign Priority – Use campaign priority to indicate to Bing what products are more important (e.g. breaking out a top sellers campaign with a higher campaign priority)
• Store – Select the Bing Merchant Center store you’d like to pull products from
• Products – Select “all products”, or filter based on a number of product attributes (options shown below)

Once the campaign is created, drill down into the ad group.  You’ll see a single Product Group called “All Products”.  By default, all of your products will receive the same bid unless you segment them for more granular bidding. To segment your product groups, click the + button next to All Products.

Select from the dropdown what product attribute you would like to segment by (common examples are Brand, Product Type, Price Point, Margins). Next, select the categories you would like to segment out.  Anything that is not selected will be lumped into an “everything else” product group.

After saving, you’ll see that you can now bid independently on the segmented product groups.  If you have a large product catalog, you can segment even further by clicking the + button next to any of the individual product groups (e.g. Segment from Brand then Price).

Not too daunting, right? We’d recommend testing Bing Shopping even if – or maybe especially if – you’ve been happy with your Google Shopping results. The platforms can behave a little differently, but the concepts are very similar -- and we always recommend maximizing coverage of high-performing ad types.

Good luck!