Bing Adjusts adCenter to Automatically Include Plurals
Bing is introducing a new service which will automatically include the plurals of your ad campaign keywords, exposing your ad to even more potential traffic. This will potentially save a lot of time from having to manually input each of these plurals, as well as help cover you in case you miss any.
To be clear, this won’t automatically affect every keyword in your directory, only keywords where the meaning of the word is maintained. For instance, the first search term that popped into my mind was “soap” (don’t ask me why). While the term “soap” returns results for Simple Object Access Protocol and the common household cleanser, the term “soaps” returns quite a few results for soap operas. Each of these obviously varies drastically from the others, so it’s likely that term – and those like it – will not be automatically included.
Another important note is that if you’re already bidding on plurals for specific phrases, those ads will trump any singular-keywords ads Bing may want to pluralize and, of course, you won’t be placing duplicate ads concurrently – one for the singular and one for the plural. So if you’re already managing both singular and plural keywords, nothing is going to change for you.
This will mostly affect individual who are currently bidding on singular keyword who have missed, or not thought to include, plurals of that same keyword.
I'm inclined to disable this service, eventually.
Why?
When you’re doing A/B Testing – which you should be doing with online advertising – you want to limit as many variables as possible. It’s easy to think that a little “s” isn’t going to make a huge difference, and it probably won’t. But weirder things have happened on the Internet. For some inexplicable reason, a plural keyword may not work as well as a singular keyword, and you don’t want your money going toward an ineffectual keyword.
It's not clear yet exactly how the service is going to work – how and if you’ll be informed when your singular keyword ad is used for a plural keyword – but this new service will hopefully tell you which plural keywords you’re missing. This, in my opinion, will be the greatest value of this rollout. This will give you more control over your ads and, ultimately, your money.
So you may want to let the service run for a few week in order to give you a better understanding of which keywords you may be missing out on; then go ahead and manage those plural keywords manually.
A good online advertising campaign isn't the type of thing you can put on autopilot or just leave up to chance. You can’t just assume a plural keyword is going to evoke the same reaction as a singular keyword. Instead, you need to be actively involved in the process and carefully manage your various options.
So, utilize the tool to help you get a better grasp on your ad campaigns. There may very well be keywords you’ve missed and, therefore, a huge chunk of traffic you’re missing out on. But instead of just being satisfied with the automated service, take it a step further and take charge of the situation. Create a new ad with the plural keywords. Test the ad out to see if a different type of person is searching using singular vs. plural. And then capitalize on those potential differences to increase your site’s traffic.
Don’t let someone else make these decisions for you.
Scott Spjut is a writer and editor who has been featured in various magazines, newspapers and websites, including Newsweek, the Washington Post, CBS News and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. With a B.A. in Communications, he continues to write on a wealth of topics – politics, health and fitness, business, marketing and more. Scott currently works with PMI Education.
Leave a Reply
Get the SEP Newsletter
In my opinion the most effective strategy for a ppc campaign is to target manually specific keywords and to not let the ad program to display your ad to similar to your keyword words so as you mention this might be help someone find which keywords he/she may be missing out on but then he/she should manually choose the keywords…
Kostas recently posted: What Does Bing’s Growth Mean for Search Engine Optimization?