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 wont 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 (dont 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 its likely that term " and those like it " will not be automatically included.
Another important note is that if youre already bidding on plurals for specific phrases, those ads will trump any singular-keywords ads Bing may want to pluralize and, of course, you wont be placing duplicate ads concurrently " one for the singular and one for the plural. So if youre 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 youre doing A/B Testing " which you should be doing with online advertising " you want to limit as many variables as possible. Its easy to think that a little s isnt going to make a huge difference, and it probably wont. 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 dont want your money going toward an ineffectual keyword.
It's not clear yet exactly how the service is going to work " how and if youll be informed when your singular keyword ad is used for a plural keyword " but this new service will hopefully tell you which plural keywords youre 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 cant 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 youve missed and, therefore, a huge chunk of traffic youre 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 sites traffic.
Dont let someone else make these decisions for you.