Google sure knows how to get the PPC community into a tizzy of whirlwind blog posts, a spontaneous #PPCChat at an unscheduled time, and over all grumbling about how much Enhanced Campaigns is going to be a challenge. There has been a lot of talk about how we are going to need to restructure campaigns and rethink how we do things. What was a couple days ago, the norm for advanced PPC marketers is now obsolete moving forward. But one thing none of us has really thought or talked about is how will this impact BingAds?

It wasn’t that long ago that both SMBs and larger marketers were handed a nice, simple tool by BingAds, to import your Google campaigns. I am sure the addition of that tool helped with their 4th quarter growth in CPCs and revenue.

As reported in a RKG’s Q4 report :

“In late 2012, Bing Ads finally seemed to be hitting its stride. Bing’s expanded ad matching capabilities are now delivering quality traffic to advertisers at much greater rates” and;

“Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to bring Bing Ads’ core functionality more in line with AdWords have made it easier to manage both programs, reducing barriers to entry for smaller advertisers.”

Now with the advent of Enhanced campaigns, it raises a couple of concerns for the Yahoo!|Bing Network. From a strictly technical side of things, the new enhanced campaign structure makes the importation of campaigns from Google, if not impossible, downright messy. The new structure, bid modifiers, ad group level sitelinks etc in many ways look nothing like the campaigns of yesterday. To think that we will be able to simply login and copy the campaigns into BingAds seems a little naive.

As a second point of interrupting BingAds growth, how much time do you think Agencies and Companies are going to be spending in the coming weeks and months on Enhanced campaigns? There is a whole new thought process on how campaigns should be organized, people trying to find work-arounds, and then the actual implementation and migration of campaigns from their current state into Enhanced Campaigns is going to be huge! Are we all magically going to get more time in the day or all choose to work tons of extended hours? No what will happen, as is usual when a new “fire” pops up, less “important” things will be neglected… In this case BingAds.

Finally BingAds now faces an uphill battle because the way people are going to think about organizing search campaigns will be around the Big Dawg Google. BingAds campaigns are once again going to look foreign compared to how we will be structuring, managing and running the campaigns that take up the majority of most PPC managers time. For them it basically throws out all of the development they have done to get “BingAds up to par”, because Google just changed the game.

So…

The answer isn’t an easy one. BingAds will be forced to do one of a couple of things.
Forget trying to import Google campaigns and focus on the fact they don’t force us into running all devices in one campaign.
Try to come up with a hack to still import the new Enhanced Campaigns in all their ugliness and make them work on the Yahoo!|Bing Network.
Give in and copy Google’s new Enhanced Campaigns
I hope for all of us BingAds focuses on either option one and the possibility of two. Because #3 just doesn’t look pretty.

I’d love to hear what you think. Do you think Enhanced Campaigns will have a big impact? What do you think BingAds option’s are?