We’ve already given you five reasons why Bing shouldn’t be ignored for search marketing, and its latest integration with LiveRamp provides a sixth.
The underappreciated Microsoft search engine, which actually owns close to a fifth of the global search market, has introduced the data onboarder’s identity resolution provider IdentityLink. And while that may not mean much, in simple terms it allows Bing’s advertisers to target existing customers with relevant ads in the search results.
That brings the search engine more up to speed with market leader Google whose Customer Match tool is what IdentityLink was initially created for, allowing brands to match their existing banks of customer data – such as email address, phone number and physical address – with the company’s own data acquired via logins to its services.
For example, a hotel that had acquired its customer’s email address could use the tool to target that same customer with a localised advert if they searched for phrases such as ‘hotels near me’. That’s providing they’d also used their email address on one of Google’s services and were logged in at the time of search, which many users tend to be.
However, where IdentityLink gets clever, and what Bing will be able to exploit from those logged into Yahoo, AOL and, of course, Microsoft properties, is drawing in other data attributes such as when the consumer last bought a related product, allowing brands to tailor ads accordingly.
For those that aren’t logged into any of those services, however, IdentityLink might be able to make a match between cookies on its profile and those on the user’s device, resulting in about a 25% customer-matching success rate, according to LiveRamp’s CMO, Jeff Smith speaking to MarTech Today.
Meanwhile, Smith isn’t too proud to admit that advertisers using Bing search advertising are more than likely going to be supplementing a larger chunk of activity on Google, explaining that the LiveRamp integration is cross-compatible between the two search engines.
“By adding LiveRamp IdentityLink to Bing Ads Custom Audiences, we’re giving search marketers the ability to integrate their efforts across these two powerful channels. They can distribute the same segments used for Google Customer Match to Bing Ads to lower their CPA [cost per action] while increasing conversion rates and return-on-ad-spend.”
