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Wasteful Wednesday #21 – “Google vs. Bing”

Watch Episode 21 on "Google vs. Bing":

← Watch Episode 20 on “Management" | Watch Episode 22 on “Local Intent” →

Read the Transcript of Episode 21 on "Google vs. Bing":

Hey, everybody out there, you've got Francis Shovlin from Seer's Client Engagement team, rocking with you on a Wednesday. I'm happy to be a guest on Seer's Wasteful Wednesday series.

But with the holidays around the corner, I want to take a little spin instead of wasteful, let's talk about grateful -- Grateful Wednesday.

Grateful Wednesday - Google vs. Bing

What am I grateful for? Microsoft. Hmm. Why is that?

Well, recently Google started to throttle how much search data they're giving in their search query reports, so that interest us to start looking into Bing and seeing what kind of data they still had available.

What was great to find out was there was five times the amount of data within Bing, and 87% of those queries were unique to Bing.

So that's information we would never find out about your audience, unless we looked at this data.

What I want to do today is definitely dive into some examples that we found as we look into the data in terms of opportunity and perhaps waste.

Example Walkthrough: Law School

Part of the first examples here are Bing queries that didn't receive any clicks, but got impressions. So what that means to me is it could be irrelevant people aren't clicking your ads. But it also could be that your ads aren't speaking to the user.

In these first three examples, I should say, we find that perhaps Bing isn't as intelligent as Google when it comes to what it should show -- whether that's an ad or organic listing.

So these are some opportunities where there might be some waste involved.

Query: "Westlaw for law school"

The first one is "Westlaw for law school", as you can see here, Google is not showing any ads.

But Bing is still showing an ad here.

This does not seem to be relevant for these users, so maybe there's an opportunity to look at this and to negate.

Example Walkthrough: Local Nursing Colleges

Query: "Centra College of Nursing"

Second is a local result. Again, Google indicating local with the maps, some of the results here are relevant to the college, but not showing any ads.

Again with Bing, we are still seeing nursing program ads, for the searches.

Query: "Shadyside School of Nursing"

The last one is Shadyside. Again, local listing, no organic or no ads on Google...

But within Bing, they are showing ads...

What we had found out with these queries, which were unique to Bing, was that there was a lot of local or college competitors in the queries that we may want to look to negate or further refine our ad copy to maybe better speak to these users.

Example Walkthrough: EDD Programs

Query: "EDD program"

Perhaps even if we're not local, we're online now, as most people are, this next one is for EDD. EDD is relevant to the Higher Ed industry with a qualifier like program.

We did start to see some queries around just EDD, which is relevant.

But when you actually take a look at the SERPs, you find out that it's actually related to the California's employment development department. And with COVID going on, there was a lot more interest in this as folks were looking for unemployment.

So this was an easy win for us to negate and save our clients a ton of cash.

Example Walkthrough: SBEC Certs

Query: "SBEC teacher certification"

The next one we found just on Bing was "SBEC teacher certification", which is a great teaching certification in San Diego campus, that's local -- I'm in San Diego, perfect.

But if you look at the SERPs here...

...you actually understand this is something related to Texas. So would someone in San Diego really be interested in this?

Perhaps if I'm looking to relocate, but if I go onto the website, you can see here that this is focused on California teachers. Maybe the certificate is transferrable to Texas, but again, I don't see anything about Texas on here or even SBEC.

So maybe some opportunity to improve this landing page to be more relevant to the user.

Net-New Paid Search Opportunities

Now, I want to pivot and look at some opportunities, perhaps.

Query: "Hardest law schools to get into"

So in this example, "hardest law schools to get into", you could see Google here showing some knowledge panels and showing organic results.

The same with Bing, another example of still showing an ad, "the hardest law school to get into" with an ad stating "become an attorney nationally accredited".

I don't know necessarily if this is exactly what I'm looking for. So maybe an opportunity to negate this, and also an opportunity to build out content. If your school is looking to promote itself as one of the hardest law schools to get into, it might be a good for the resume for folks who did apply, and get a degree from there.

Query: "I have a BM degree and want to study RN degree BSN"

The last one I have here was actually one where both Google and Bing were showing ads, which is, "I have a BM degree and want to study RN degree BSN".

So right now you can see here...

A lot of these are talking about going from RN to BSN, but you don't really see anything in here about BM at all, both on the Google SERP and within the Bing SERP.

So this is an opportunity to really speak more towards this user, and weed out some irrelevant clicks.

Thank you all for joining me today on what I had deemed the Grateful Wednesday would love to hear what you all are grateful for in some comments below.


Key Takeaways


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Francis Shovlin
Francis Shovlin
Sr. Manager, Account Director