The future of feed based advertising to be driven by advertisers, says James Murray of Microsoft Bing in an interview with Laura Hampton of Impression, explaining that Bing is basing the future of its feed advertising – including Shopping – on the information in advertisers’ feeds.
Rather than postulating what advertisers might like to do, Bing will instead look at the information that already sits within feeds and make assessment on the most valuable new functionalities based on that. They hope this approach will enable them to further differentiate their platform from AdWords.
“Shopping is still relatively new for Bing. It’s something we’ve now established and we’re happy we’ve got through a lot of the initial teething problems, but the feedback we’ve had from customers is that it works, but they’re not seeing enough volume. For us, one of the big drivers and one of the things we want to fix is how we increase that volume,” says Murray.
“There are a few things on the horizon for changes and tweaks and so one of the things we’re asking advertisers is to really give us as much information as they can in their feeds in order to allow us to offer new ways to use that information in the product.”
One example he gives is that if advertisers give price filter information within their feed, Bing can use that information to make price ranges a part of the product.
“What we want to do with feed based advertising overall is to take as much information as we can ingest from those feeds and make new products around them.” he explains.
So what does this mean for advertisers today, and how will we change the way we manage feed based advertising in response?
Liam Wade, PPC Manager at Impression (which recently won the Best Small PPC Agency award at the European Search Awards) said:
“Though they’ve been around since the beginning, feeds have increased in importance significantly over the past 3 years. New agencies are being formed on the basis of their feed optimisation talents, and a well-built feed sets you up for a high performing Shopping campaign.
As more and more advertisers are increasing their investment into product ads, advertising platforms will become hungry for more feed attributes, in order to provide the best possible product ad for the user”
Laura Hampton spoke to James Murray about a range of topics relevant to search and paid advertising – view all Bing Interviews here.
