Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Tuesday everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, the co founder and chief digital strategist here at BWG Connect. We're just a giant networking and knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands. And, you know, we spend a lot of our time just talking with brands, and you know, what's top of mind for them. And that's how we get the topics for events like this. Again, we're gonna do close to 100 in-person events this year. So if you're in a tier one city across the US, maybe even tier two, let us know. And we just mark it down as hey, if we're coming to town, we'd love to have you at one of our dinners. The other thing is, we're helping a lot of people out with partner selection. Right now, there's a ton of stuff going on with making Amazon profitable. Also rationalizing tech stacks, who's working who's not so if you ever want to chat on any of that stuff, feel free to put time on our calendar. We're 100% free to brands and so we love spending those those that time like with people in the network as a whole. This call though, if Google dies, SEO and PPC best practices for Bing search in a anyways, I've got 100 questions, but Jordan, I'm gonna kick it over to you first. Because there are a lot of questions around what's going on with Google what's going on with Bing but I don't mind kick it over to you your had been a great friend partner supported the network for years now. And just you know, if you want to jump in and you know, brief intro on yourself and Coalition, that'd be awesome. And then we can jump into the conversation. Sounds good.

Jordan Brannon 1:50

Yeah. So Jordan, Brannon, I'm President, co founder of Coalition Technologies, we are a Los Angeles based are headquartered that means a lot less than it used to with a lot of remote team members today, agency focused on eCommerce, primarily. And we are a full service agency, although we're perhaps best known for our work in eCommerce, SEO and pay per click, which is sort of a helpful tie in for this conversation. today. We work with brands of all sizes, established small businesses up to Fortune one hundreds and so have a lot of experience and can offer support in a variety of areas and ways. And again, kind of sweet spots for me where I got my start in eCommerce was running my own eComm drop shipping b2b with a focus on SEO and pay per click and in terms of being able to market them, and that was, where I cut my teeth and ultimately is where the agency even came out of was from that experience. Yeah.

Aaron Conant 2:53

Awesome. And just a quick reminder here, they said one question come in already, what we're talking about in kind of the pre call here, but if you have questions along the way, drop them into the chat there. Drop them into the q&a, and we'll get as many and I just opened up the chat. So you can drop in there. And we'll get as many questions answered as possible as we go. And so, you know, Jordan, we've been, we've been talking for years now. We've done a lot on Google. We've done a lot on, you know, SEO, it seems like it's always focused on Google. And then, like, I don't think we've ever talked big before ever outside of a passing. Hey, should anybody be concerned and you kind of broke down the percentages? Why now? I think I have I want to hear your response. But you know, why haven't we talked about it before then? Why Why should be talking about it now? Yeah,

Jordan Brannon 3:51

I think the running joke inside of the SEO and paid search Industries was you know, Bing was an acronym for because it's not Google. Where they came up with with the name for it. Again, I don't necessarily know that. That's sort of the the real naming convention behind it. So they're probably is an origin story that I shouldn't be more familiar with. I think another one of my favorite statistics to cite when people talk about, you know, why traditionally, SEO and pay per click folks tend to spend less time with Bing was that at one point, the most popular search term on Bing on any given day was Google people were, you know, going into their edge or Internet Explorer browser and then trying to get to Google and so the the function of Bang was to refer traffic to a Google and so obviously, that there's there's some sarcasm there. It's not an insignificant player inside of search. But ultimately, it really had a relatively similar approach to ranking websites and given the fractional odds audience that being possessed, it really sort of, for most brands didn't make sense having a lot of dedicated or differentiated Strategy or investment in the SEO or paid side of things.

Aaron Conant 5:14

When we talk about, you know, being as a whole, you know, what kind of size difference are we talking about between Google and Bing? And, you know, just what does that growth trajectory look like? Because, you know, I've seen some stats out there, I don't have that on top of mine. But, you know, just that, you know, before, you know, ChatGPT comes out, and then now post in what's going on? Yeah, yeah, I

Jordan Brannon 5:40

mean, I think the most recent one I saw said something like 40% growth in Bing search users since the beginning of this year. So certainly a really substantial needle mover. And if that sustains that, really, again, we sort of see that sort of death of Google, you know, if you can sustain a 40% return or growth every month, you're going to be in a spot where you've eaten the market pretty quickly, I think kind of more recent data. Sounds like Google runs probably around nine times the search volume of being across all device types. And you can start to sort of look at that, in particular, sub categories. Google has traditionally been very strong in mobile, Android platform has been very helpful on that front. And that's really helped to feed success in terms of us search usage, obviously, also, that the relationship with Apple, which has been talked about quite a bit, has helped that being, interestingly enough, in terms of its strength categories, still does really well in desktop users or, you know, basically a laptop type computer. And I think I've seen studies that give it, you know, probably into the 30 percentile of sort of search market for desktop users. Really interesting category is 40%, of the gaming console market. In terms of, again, their default search is going to rely on banks. So that's another kind of strong area where maybe there's a bit of an outsized performance for it. I think that sort of plays to some of what we see just in terms of taking that audience. And then how does that play out for? How does that play out for actual businesses, because Bing is often pre installed on sort of the Microsoft suite of things. It tends to do pretty well in larger enterprise networks that are running a Windows stack of, of operating system and software solutions. And so in a lot of places, Bing can be helpful from like that b2b query, people doing a search at work. In that, again, sort of it just seems to point back to the fact that Microsoft is still the network of choice for a lot of large enterprises. And so that seems to kind of drive some of that market share specifically.

Aaron Conant 8:01

I mean, it didn't we just break it down. As we're getting into this. This is all linked back. Right to ChatGPT. Yeah, that's just the reality. Right? I mean,

Jordan Brannon 8:11

that we wouldn't have the conversation If ChatGPT hadn't generated that much interest. You know. So I think ultimately, that is one of the areas that, you know, kind of prompts us question, if they hadn't sort of had the early investor status, the close relationship. I think that sort of probably would have, you know, we could have forgotten about being again for awhile. And then also, I think, frankly, one of the interesting things I've always, after 20 years of working with Google, sort of at the heart of my livelihood. I've, I've always been surprised how easily Google can fumble product launches. And so the bard launch, which most of us saw some of the funny kind of commentary and takeaways from that, you know, sort of show that, you know, maybe Google is a little weaker in this particular category. And then again, sort of more recent news, I think, last week, or maybe over the weekend, the story that Samsung was, was talking about moving away from Google and looking at Bing or Microsoft product as a substitute. Obviously, Samsung has a big, big play there in terms of that mobile category where Google is strong. And so again, you can actually see some equity between the two of them.

Aaron Conant 9:27

How how do you Google miss it so bad?

Jordan Brannon 9:32

I honestly I think it was sort of that that decision to rush and it also a decision to sort of roll with what you have versus what you don't have. But it was interesting. I thought, rather than trying to launch sort of that conversational chat tool. Google should have immediately sort of looked at sort of the search play, you know, so what what, how can that conversational model just change the way that people receive results? Rather than I sort of do I have to talk about it with a chatbot, which Microsoft was doing really well. And I think Google still has, I think, an advantage and LLM and generative AI over Microsoft, and even over eight open AI. But where it works is not necessarily in that human to human interaction. It's a pseudo experience that's tried to replicate. So I think they tried to be, you know, we can do this too. Instead of thinking about like, Hey, this is where our AI is really strong. Let's play to that.

Aaron Conant 10:30

Yeah. And it was that freakout whatever their code read they had, right, which is, you know, and then what are we going to do immediately? Without having? Yeah, I didn't, as smart as they are, I thought it was a horrible, horrible

Jordan Brannon 10:44

product launches are definitely not what Google is good at. And if you've been around the Google ecosystem for long enough time, the new names every two years for the same product with minor improvements, because they didn't do it right. The first time is sort of part of your experience. And so we've already moved on, I think, from BART, I think I saw Magi I think is the new one that's supposed to be coming now to save Samsung or something like that. So yeah, it's it was kind of a classic Google fumble on that one.

Aaron Conant 11:12

Yeah. But at the end of the day, has it meaningfully close the gap? Now? Yeah, yeah. We'll be thinking about it. We'd love to hear your thoughts there.

Jordan Brannon 11:25

Yeah, I'd say it's not a huge thing yet, you know, in terms of meaning, like, interpreting your question to say, like, you know, is being on sort of this trajectory, where it'll ultimately overtake Google. And I think there's some bigger challenges there, the hardware piece, the mobile operating system piece, those are really big roadblocks for Microsoft. Now, if you see something like a Samsung move, that potentially does really sort of change things, right? If you look at, you know, Google strength is sort of that that mobile experience, Samsung is I think, 30% of Android devices. And so if you have 70%, I think of global mobile device sales are on Android. And then 30%, of that Android sales base is Samsung, that one company moving over could be a real challenge. And then certainly, again, you know, one of the things that a lot of people are not talking about is, is Apple, you know, Apple has no reason to sort of be loyal to Google, per se. And, frankly, would probably love to have its own Siri type product and experience out there. And so, you know, between those two, you could really see sort of a dramatic shift inside of the search market very, very quickly, where there's parity between two or three companies instead of Google dominating everything for a long period of time.

Aaron Conant 12:50

So that, how should people be thinking about, you know, from an SEO standpoint, you know, search engine optimization, you know, between thing like, in the past, everybody did everything for Google, and Bing was almost an afterthought. Right? So now, what I'm hearing from you is, I don't necessarily have to roll it out right now. But I better know it because if this seismic shift happens, there's a good chunk that could go and if it goes, it works out? Well, we're gonna see some fast followers that just jump as well. So how different is SEO on Bing versus Google today? And, you know, what are those? How should

Jordan Brannon 13:30

we think about SEO, just generally, in a few big buckets, the first one is what search engines know about their users. And so between Google and Bing, you sort of have these exclusive ways of examining and analyzing their user base, I'm sure they have probably stolen a fair bit of each other's intellectual property and friendly ways. Over the years, so there's probably a lot of similarity there in terms of how they examine the active search user base, you know, what drives certain certain types of searches, what makes someone satisfied with a search result. And then I think, you know, behind that is sort of this subcategory of what the search engine knows about your vertical. And again, a lot of that comes back to, again, who's strong, whose websites are strong, which publishers are good go to Resources, what authors are there? What are sort of the related terms to some of the different keywords that your audience is using? What sort of represents a complete experience? So and that can sort of be bundled into sort of this endless industry centric sort of knowledge and SEO? Behind that, you probably see what this search engine knows about your site itself. You know, again, how is your site performing? Technically, what's the user experience? Like given sort of that lens of, of user preference? You know, how often are you updating content? How good is the content based on whatever their scoring metric is for that? And then I think the final bucket is sort of what does the search engine know about your entity and we talk a lot about entity awareness and ranking entities in terms of our SEO Strategy. And the idea is that, you know, 20 years ago, when I got into SEO, you really aimed just to rank your website your.com. That was all you had. Today, most of our eCommerce clients are on Amazon, and they want Amazon to rank in certain instances, that's a better play for them inside of Google search results. And other instances, they, they maybe want to have that.com thesis thing, or maybe they would prefer to have a third party retailer, or ranking for a specific term, maybe they want their social media page to, you know, kind of garner some attention. And so your entity is sort of all of those things put together as they relate. And so, you know, we sort of have to look at all of those areas. Now, I think, um, you know, based on sort of what we we have seen in terms of testing, historically, we've, we've kind of tracked this closely, really, the biggest differences between Google and Bing, from a ranking factor are sort of the approach to the index, and then also the approach to social. So Google tends to sort of have this mindset that we need to aggressively accumulate anything and everything that's happening online, in really just sort of be able to consume it, we want to be aware of what's happening out there. And so, again, I don't know that there's ever been a public release of the data from Google, other than just sort of storage volumes. But it does look like Google has significantly more content indexed at any given time than Bing does. Now. Microsoft seems to put an emphasis more on content that matters. And so it kind of wants to see sort of this indicate indicator to edge before it indexes and then begins to consider ranking content, that that content has some significance. And so early on, if you didn't have a do follow link to a primary page of your website, chances are you would struggle to be indexed with with Microsoft Bing. Now, that's changed a little bit. But But ultimately, there is sort of this sense with Microsoft being that we don't necessarily want to consume and index everything, we kind of want to know again, what matters and has significance in particular areas and store that now. Again, the other piece I touched on was social signals. When you look at sort of the difference between Google and Microsoft, Bing, there's a lot of indicators that Microsoft puts a both more initial weight and more lasting weight on social signals, and then also uses social signals to decide what to index in the first place. And so you see sort of social activity and behaviors that are public, sort of moving the needle for Microsoft indexes and ranking. Google does use social signals, so does not sort of just completely ignore them. But they're held in a little bit more of a balanced tension with some of the the Eat E A T type criteria, which Google uses along the way. And then also, just things like links, you know, tend to have a bit more of a balanced value against social signals with Google than what we would see in Microsoft.

Aaron Conant 18:13

So if we really think about social signals, is a whole, you know, how do they impact the Bing rankings? At the end of the day? What should brands be thinking about? Right? This is all new stuff. I don't think anybody can, I should say, and everybody, but most people didn't. Bing was an afterthought. What should they be thinking about in terms of what they should be investing in? Right up to influence Bing rankings,

Jordan Brannon 18:38

I'll touch on sort of that social signals standpoint, the, again, public content, some of our clients do really well in hobbyist and an enthusiast categories, where there's private groups, private online communities, forums that are quite active, you know, things that are gated in any way. And they can do really, really well there. But But frankly, a lot of that just doesn't have bearing on how Microsoft is going to sort of look at, you know, adjusting your ranking based on what you're doing well, and so, public social content is really key in terms of making sure that that material is going live not only from your own profile, but also that there is some engagement with with content that you're creating, or is related to you as a brand or your products. So, you know, basically, the more public content you have, there is sort of a volume play here. That's pointing back to particular PDPs and relating those PDPs to certain searchable type terms. It's going to work in your favor. I would also say that Microsoft does play a bit more of a popularity game. Now there is a bit of a high school lunchroom thing that plays out in terms of how Microsoft looks at the social signals. And so popularity of certain profiles, the number of times that those profiles are tagged or linked to or retweeted or, you know, engaged with score mentioned, all of those things can be, again, publicly for certain platforms are going to begin to drive, how important or how influential that sort of social signal can be to ranking your particular website. And so you can see sort of the value of an influencer campaign that is really maybe just geared towards social, you know, signals having an impact on SEO and being maybe more than you would see, you know, with with Google. And then again, I touched on this, I think, in the prior sort of comments, Microsoft tends to respect social signals for a longer period of time than Google. Google today sort of has a declining value for links. But it takes a while and we see sort of Microsoft having sort of this slower erosion of value to social signals over time, and so even after a good influencer campaign, you can still see months later some lingering impact of that in terms of your ranking there. So

Aaron Conant 21:04

yeah, no, it's just interesting. Like, I mean, that seems like a key piece of data to pull out. Right is kind of social signaling piece. Would you say? That's the number one thing that people should be focusing on?

Jordan Brannon 21:18

Yep. Yeah. I mean, if we're talking about today's being, again, there's sort of, I think, a lot of evolution that's happening in sort of short order, I would say yes, that's probably one of the big things that I would dial into is that social signaling piece, a lot of what you do, in terms of SEO for Google is going to have a positive play for being and you'll often see some some parallels between the two, they're not not usually really dramatically different. But again, if we want to sort of look at achieving something like Google's eat, type influence. With Bing, we would look more to social signals. And we would look to, to sort of the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. That's what the the Eat acronym stands for an SEO for Google. And so again, Microsoft being sort of crowd sources that data through social signals, maybe more than Google would be comfortable with.

Aaron Conant 22:16

Yeah. So there are a couple questions I want to bust through that have come in really quick. These are things that Bing will overtake Google. That's an interesting question. Right? Yeah. And then use your quick thoughts on on BART or bards replacement? Right. Yeah. Because of that. I want to the next one, is it kind of plays into? You're just talking about today's bang? Yeah. Right. And I want to tie it into those two, because is it gonna overtake it? Most of you're gonna say, probably not, but knows. And then it's evolution that you're talking about when you're just saying today's thing?

Jordan Brannon 22:52

Yeah. Yeah, I I'll kind of maybe I'll touch on the the first question, do I think Bing will overtake Google? I don't know that I could make that call today. But I will say I think, you know, my sort of near term. You know, prognostication is going to be that, you know, Google will lose a lot of its market share from a search perspective in the next three years. I don't think SEO goes away. I don't think paid search sort of activities go away. I just I don't see a roadmap. I don't think Google has enough things on lockdown, like it used to. And I think again, you sort of look at a massive portion of the mobile Android Market potentially wanting to offload Google that's a big chunk. I think there's a lot of rumblings about Apple increasingly wanting to operate its own search products. Obviously, this LLM piece is a bit of a sore spot for them, right. Microsoft was supposed to be sort of in the rearview mirror of of Apple in a lot of ways, from a consumer sort of technology standpoint. But now all of a sudden, again, I've publicly complained about this, I have an Apple iPhone, and Siri is the worst of all of my sort of intelligent assistants, you know, the speech Tech, I just everything about it is sort of irritating. So I do see sort of this, this formula where Apple potentially wants to move away from Google probably wants to do its own LLM thing, at some point integrated to Apple devices, that's going to have an impact. I think Microsoft can gain a lot of market share in, you know, again, in potentially in mobile and some other spots. So I think there's just as a weak future for Google, whether or not it's being that's overtaking it, I think is a question. And I think ultimately, that's sort of why, regardless of what Google does, from an AI standpoint, I just don't know that they can differentiate enough against what's out there to sort of jump back into the 95% Plus driver's seat. Again, to move the needle for you today with sort of a ChatGPT experience. I just, I don't know that. Any of us or maybe maybe they can surprise us. Maybe we finally get to that super intelligent AI that prints food and whatever else we need for life, but I just don't see Google jumping in there. And then I think the last question about Bard, I have used it, I'm kind of, you know, we're part of the early releases of some of it, we're testing sort of the new code release features that came out. Again, and conversationally, it's not as good as what we've had in terms of a ChatGPT experience. And so a lot of the public commentary about spas are right there. So

Aaron Conant 25:23

yeah, I guess the other way to look at it is, I don't know if the question is, Will being overtake Google. But how big of a of an impact will Google see? Right? It might not just be bang beating, you know, but a significant impact because of all these other activities that are taking place? Yeah, exactly. Should we integrate index now? Yeah,

Jordan Brannon 25:52

no, I would. So index now is is essentially just a way where you can trigger awareness about what content changes and updates are happening on your website or web properties in a fast way. It doesn't have to be done through index. Now, there are sort of other ways beyond sort of index now that you can leverage do that. But it is a very accessible and easy one that works well. So index now i, we generally would recommend for most of the brands that we work with the

Aaron Conant 26:25

next one that popped up, if you have a commodity based brand, where consumers aren't brand loyal, and social fouling is very challenging to grow. Would you still spend a lot of resources on social for Google and Bing purposes?

Jordan Brannon 26:39

Yeah, I think what I would probably call out there is that, again, I with social, we always sort of are aiming for a two fold benefit. And so you know, we have social campaigns are running for our clients. And so I want to see the value both in social and when we're doing something that we think will have value in social organically, we also want to make sure we're setting that up for success from an SEO standpoint. And so part of what we can do is help assess what the total value of a particular influencer campaign or relationship might be if you can't grow your own sort of social following in a meaningful way. Who shouldn't you be interacting with who's going to provide value in sort of the near term social campaign, but also, you know, again, in the way that we roll out content and some of the Strategy around that, can we provide a longer term SEO value. And so again, I wouldn't necessarily make the total value statement and decision based on just the SEO piece. Because frankly, a lot of times the, you know, it's we're talking top of funnel for SEO, and we can often be a little further down the funnel in terms what we're doing from an influencer or social campaign. And so I would say, when you compare the two together, absolutely, I would still spend a fair bit of resources between the two today.

Aaron Conant 27:54

I'm gonna jump back to Yeah, we're kind of talking about was, you know, are saying today's thing? And how would you differentiate and as you said, you sit at a great spot, right, where you're interacting with these brands, and they're actively asking you to do these things, and you're trying them and you're seeing real time on these changes. So to put your, your forward looking future as cap on how you differentiate from what you think, you know, will be, you know, tomorrow's being

Jordan Brannon 28:27

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways, tomorrow is being is already here, I think there's just we don't understand what sort of the edges of that are going to be because it's going to expand from where it is today. You know, I think, um, you know, being chat, you know, Microsoft Bing, chat, ChatGPT, enabled Bing, whatever you want to kind of call it already has some different behaviors and different outcomes, and what you're seeing with sort of traditional being, you know, I think it's, it's already, I think, sort of just look at, like the way that's influenced Microsoft's popularity, I think, one of the press releases, I'd seen said something like 1/3 of all users were trialing the new Bing experience are new to Bing search, which is just a crazy sort of growth thing. And that's really going to start to drive when you can add 33% net new users in a three month period, for a mature product. You know, it's really going to drive what happens next for the whole. And so, you know, some of the areas where we see some differences, we already don't see consistent rankings, when looking at what content is generated and used as part of the chat response, compared to those that we would see in a normal search results page. That's not always the case. But a lot of instances, what you see responded to isn't necessarily going to rely on what you see as sort of the actual ranking for a similar search query without the chat experience. And so sort of the blending of the two I think that the nickname used is Prometheus, I think because what I've seen is sort of the product name, the that's the the technology blend between the search and the chat. And so Microsoft's version of ChatGPT first sort of has, we often think about it versus as what we get back. But one of the really interesting ways that they're using it as that they're actually using it to take your more complicated search query, and then break that down into more digestible snippets that can then be applied to Microsoft's index and ranking algorithms. And so it's sort of essentially helping the search engine to understand what it is you're asking before it then responds and gives you something back that you can understand more than just that sort of typical list of of pages where there's not necessarily a recommendation even answer to your question. So right now, the things that are sort of being leaned into with Microsoft Bing, there seems to be a pretty clear bias, that sites and web properties that have sort of a history and an assumption of addressing informational type queries, they did their sites that are sort of built for informational or educational intent, there's sort of a pretty clear bias there, that that does leave a lot of eCommerce brands sort of vulnerable, we've kind of moved on from sort of wanting to do a lot of text content on our websites. You know, for a lot of eCommerce brands, they sort of have forgotten about the value in that or have diminished the value in it. And so there's sort of this, this need to sort of revisit that, I think, again, authorship really seems to be making a big difference in terms of who gets shown or who gets used as part of that ChatGPT response. And so, high profile, well respected authors, people who are being quoted or cited or ever getting a strong social profile, seemed to be important in terms of how some of those responses are being picked based on that sort of ranking algorithm that's applied. And so you know, kind of the TLDR of all of that, make sure you're not only focused on just selling your product or service, make sure you're also really building up a body of content, that's educational information around what it is you do and why. And this is true, whether you're in fashion, and you're trying to tell people how to style an outfit, or what sort of end in trend for spring 2023, or whether you're selling, you know, a some sort of specialty electronic components to, you know, an engineer someplace, you need to sort of make sure you're addressing that piece, keep your content up to date, there is again, a bit of a bias towards recency that we're seeing, make sure that when you make a content update, or you add a new content, make sure it's being shared to social, it promptly, again, is pretty key, build up the profiles associated with key authors or people at your brand. Again, this is also becoming an increasingly helpful tip just from a Google crossover. So you can make a really clear relationship that, hey, this author, they work here, they produce a lot of our content here. And that person then has a higher profile in your industry that can really help, again, build a bigger footprint for you in terms of this ChatGPT response. And then also specificity, you really see a bias, again, towards websites and content that offer a specific answer to a specific question or seem to, and this is where some of the mistaken information comes from is that the LLM can sort of pull in and think this is the answer and miss some of the context cues. And so but again, that specificity is really important. So if you do have specific concerns, or opportunities that you can address, with your products or services, always really kind of call those out as clearly as possible. And that can be very, very helpful in terms of sort of that, that ranking in sort of this, this chat enabled search experience.

Aaron Conant 33:53

It's awesome. But it's another thing people have to be concerned with. But if I pull out, you know, kind of what I'm hearing is you need the informational content. Right? And combined with strong social signaling, and those are going to be the to the what we're seeing right now, those are the two things that flip the switches. So yeah, maybe I need

Jordan Brannon 34:17

to move to that do do good, normal baseline SEO. And then those two things, if you want to sort of see yourself ranking, you want to see your site being quoted Cited Reference incorporated into some of those those chat responses. That's the way to do it.

Aaron Conant 34:32

The next big question that pops up is around, you know, just advertising a huge part of what Google's budget is huge part of people's media spend today. You know, what are you anticipating is going to be the shift and should people be shifting already know?

Jordan Brannon 34:53

Yeah, I would say if you're not already, you know, if you have any sort of good Google Ads practice, I would say like You have to be active and Microsoft Bing. Anyways, barring just an infinitesimal budget, you're already sort of struggling to sort of maximize high performing Google campaigns, you really should have, should have moved some of the budgets towards Microsoft Bing advertising a while ago, and certainly more. So now. I think one of the things that we are seeing that's really interesting in terms of the context of this eCommerce conversation, since that's what we do, and that's what a lot of people here are doing, is that there is really a lot of talk today about Microsoft, sort of incorporating ads for publishers, when we see sort of Microsoft, talking about what the ad products are going to look like, we kind of see that sort of term publishers come up kind of frequently, which tells me they're thinking about it a little bit differently than an eCommerce brand would write, we think about product ads, and we think about sort of, you know, sellable type advertising. And Google is thinking, or certainly Microsoft is thinking, we're thinking of a publisher. And so I would say that, again, kind of going back to even the SEO piece, begin to think a little bit more like a publisher in terms of the type of landing page or content you're creating, to run and promote your eCommerce experience. Because I don't think a typical eCommerce page format is going to do well in that sort of circumstance. And so you'll you'll really want to make sure that there is some approach there now. Already today, we see value in That's right, we have some of our clients were top of funnel, one of the best categories for them is I have I need help with X type of problem. They've got a product or a suite of products that address that. We kind of learned a long time ago that traditional PDP didn't work to sell product detail page didn't work to sort of sell on that search query. And we could and so we had specific page template experiences, which most big eCommerce platforms allow you to spin up pretty quickly today without a big lift, that allows us to highlight how this product solves for this problem. And then also has all of the other functionality you expect with a product detail page, you know, be able to buy, see reviews, check availability, user discounts available all of those sorts of things in the same spot, and that's been really, really successful for us. And I think that type of experience will be really successful in sort of wave one of of Microsoft Bing, ChatGPT power to advertising.

Aaron Conant 37:31

Hey, I'm not sure. You might have lost me there just a little bit. Yeah, sorry. They would just kidding. Help me? Yeah, like, visualize that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Brannon 37:42

So we have a client, who has mainly focused on pest control products, they emphasize sort of natural, safe and environmentally responsible ways to sort of handle certain pests in your home or garden. So that's sort of their, their sweet spot. Again, I think someone had called out in the chat earlier, you know, your brand, where people aren't necessarily loyal to you, they just want to buy a product and solve a problem. And then move on. This is sort of that category. And so a lot of the search volume for them. And an SEO, top of funnel is typically sort of people looking at identifying the past, you know, what is this creature that's showing up in my house? How do I get rid of it. And, again, just through SEO, and then also, through some advertising, we've done, we've sort of seen that, we can take that top of funnel informational query and convert it at step one at a strong rate. And so we have, but we have to do that in a different sort of product, detail page experience, instead of gallery of photos, big product name, pricing, you know, a little bit of reviews, Add to Cart button, all sorts of being you're above the fold, we create product page experiences, which are really a lot more like a that publisher, you know, here's sort of an article about, hey, this is a bedbug, you know, you don't want them and here's how you can take care of them in a way that, you know, your family is not moving out of your house for a year. You know, those sorts of things. And this is actually a product detail page. It's got availability, it's got add to cart in terms of the eCommerce Store, content management system, it's running as a PDP fits into product feeds, but it just is structured in a very different way from your typical, you know, what we would we would envision as part of that e-comm navigation experience. If

Aaron Conant 39:30

you're talking about publishers you know, in content and the social side, like does this shift the is there a shift back to publishers who are actually naturally prone they're already doing it today. It seems like for a little while, you know, there's this pendulum was swinging to brands. Yeah, the eCommerce brands blow they can tons of money, it's there. But now these are the signals that are going off. Publishers are Already there gloves? Yeah. If you want to give away money, right? If you get on your own website, you don't have to pay an affiliate fee. That's awesome. But yeah,

Jordan Brannon 40:07

yeah, I do think that there is a bit of that happening, I think there is a bit of this move back to sort of publishers receiving sort of priority and search index. And that's it. Again, it's not necessarily a new story. It's one that we've sort of seen a bit of attention and waffling over time with, with how different search engines promote different content and what they think is right. And so I do think there's going to be some of that for the near term. I don't know that it's going to be long lived. I think one of the things that we're seeing Google talk about, and I'll bring it up, because I think it'll inform a bit of what we see Microsoft doing is that Google is really talking about trying to step into sort of this three PL marketplace function with with, again, Magi I think is the name. There's a lot of talk about them attempting to make the Google experience one where you surface the products through informational query and interactions, you refine them, which ones do I want, which ones are available, which ones are going to be the cheapest to ship to me, which have the best reviews all through sort of this AI experience. And then I can make my purchase, right through Google, I don't necessarily need to go to your website. And so I think at the end of the day, they're probably the real shift that you know, eCommerce brands have to be mindful of is that there's a good potential that we swing past publishers, and out to these MLMs participating inside of a search experience where, you know, there's gonna be a lot of tension, I think, and land grabbing, that'll occur. As that happens, I think Microsoft will end up following suit, I think you can, you know, you may see publishers today, owning the conversation. But I think, you know, maybe in a year, we'll see that, you know, a lot of what we're doing is product feed based and trying to push Microsoft to sort of surface us as part of LM without the publishers in the middle. So I think Microsoft, at some point will sort of fall in that similar direction, you know, it can take some those cues from Google and do them better, potentially.

Aaron Conant 42:05

Yeah. You said a couple questions come through about advertising and kind of the differences on the platform. Is he can you walk us through some of the more direct comparisons that you said? Where's that immediate value? time, effort money? Is there something they are not? Yes.

Jordan Brannon 42:24

Yeah, I think there's probably a few areas where we see some value with with Bing costs are lower than Google almost 100% of the time. So when we look at just kind of a apples to apples comparison, across accounts, our average last year was about a 35% discount for comparable clicks on Google. And some of our larger spending accounts on on Microsoft Bing are closer to the 70% discount, we've seen it tighten up a little bit already. I think just as people are sort of recognizing Bing is getting more popular, we've seen a lot more bidding increase. But at least as of 2022, we saw some pretty steep discounting just because you're on the Bing search engine. Again, I touched on this earlier, really strong category for bang is that desktop over mobile search. And so if you think your product is most often going to be shopped for on desktop, you kind of know that already. I would say that, hey, there could be a really good value in pursuing Microsoft advertising more aggressively. That can be really helpful for you. What else? I think demographics data. So we see that Bings audience do tend to be older skews towards an older a group of people I think, as of like, 2020, I think I think Microsoft itself or 2019, had said, average age was in the 40s. You know, so it's a bit of an older demographic than what you would see with Google. And again, so if you're a fashion brand, and your typical, the woman you're addressing is typically going to be someone who is again, in her 40s, you may see more value in terms of pursuing some of those generic terms that just didn't perform very well. In Google, with with a big audience, specifically, again, we're seeing that get a little younger as a result of ChatGPT. That may kind of change in the future. But today, that's a value add. And then again, b2b side, a lot of people are using bang inside of a business context. And so if you're, you know, you have a sort of a e-comm effort that's focused on a professional user base, you know, again, good value in targeting what's happening in Microsoft Bing instead of perhaps Google or in addition to what's happening in Google.

Aaron Conant 44:36

Awesome, so we probably have about seven minutes left, and I have other questions coming in. Besides best practices. Do you have like Brett Best Practices recommendations? You know, for Bing advertising, I would say,

Jordan Brannon 44:52

yeah, and I'll real quickly I was gonna answer Lizzie's question about our very top of the call. Just before we get to the end. I do want to won't lose that one. But tomorrow We were talking about as an agency, one of our frustrations is that branding outside, especially like visual rules of, of color scheme and fonts and logos, often is highly subjective to the person who's running the conversation on the brand side, meaning a lot of brands do an unintentional brand refreshes every year when they hire a new communications director, Creative Director in a brand manager. And so we were talking about how we're testing an application of MLMs, where we can actually create a content guideline based on all of the historic content that's there, that is a lot more reliable, and provides some samples and some use cases for the brand to reference. And so if if there is sort of this arbitrary like, I don't think that's the brand that's coming in, because of who's currently sitting in a seat. There's a bit more accuracy and evaluation to that. So that was that was sort of that initial one, I wanted to make sure I got on but um, Aaron, you were asking a cheat sheet, I think was was what you're looking for.

Aaron Conant 46:03

That's a great way. Yeah. Best practices, but I like cheat sheet.

Jordan Brannon 46:06

Cheat Sheet. Yeah. So yeah, I think best practices. So you know, I think one, it's really easy to get set up on on Microsoft, Bing for advertising. A lot of brands probably think it's a bigger lift than it is. But Microsoft has done, you know, essentially built in a auto import function from Google ads to Microsoft. And so you can essentially poured out what's happening in terms of your mic or your Google account, you can pull that into your Microsoft Bing advertising account, with just a few clicks, it's really a pretty simple tool to use, and doesn't take a lot of lift on your side, the one thing that would highlight there is don't leave the recurring auto import on. Because once you start running the campaigns, they do start to behave differently, and you want to optimize them independently. And so we use the one time import, get the data from Google into Microsoft, Bing. And then we we don't do the recurring sort of auto update, because you can make some really great insights and discoveries and insight of being and then have the auto import, right right over the top of them. And so just making sure that you sort of begin to operate them separately from there. I would say make sure that you're consistently, you know, running health checks, as you're sort of launching your Microsoft campaigns, you know, make sure that your conversion counts are matching up to what you're seeing in your store, you know, make sure they're not being over counted or under counted. You know, make sure that you are using negative keywords. A lot of times when we set up these new sort of search, advertising platforms, people poured in a lot of the positive, that's the key word I'm after this is the audience I'm after, but we don't incorporate it in some of the negatives. And negatives often are really strong and helping us target correctly. You know, make sure that your landing page URLs made their way over correctly, make sure that you have the right landing page for the right ad group, make sure you have the right UTM parameters, and you've updated them so that they are reflecting again, that being advertising effort. And then again, just do kind of some checks, make sure you're you're running the right targeting, am I wanting to run in the Search Network? Do I want to run based on location? Do I want to run on a schedule, or not? A lot of those little things, you want to just periodically double check and make sure that you're in a good spot. Another big one when you pull in? This is sort of a funny, but also not funny if it's you. We had one account came to us and our initial inquiry was can you help us negotiate down our being a bill basically, they had migrated of their ads from Google, but they had not checked their budgets. And so they had the same daily spend volume ported from Google over to Bing, and they wanted to do Bing as a test. And they ended up finding that they had spent quite a bit of money in Bing, and nobody had been really watching that ball. And so do make sure you're checking your daily budgets. If you have a fixed amount of spend, you can work within a month and you're apportioning some of that for Microsoft, do make sure you put a cap in there. You don't want to sort of see that run away from you, that one often hurts What else I would say maybe also look at sync your merchant feed with some of your new shopping campaigns. So Google Merchant Center works for Google Bing Merchant Center is for Bing. And you can save the data between the two. So you can go to GMC be a GMC to BMC. And it takes away a lot of sort of the work in terms of setting up and optimizing your product feeds. If you optimize in one spot, you can map that and optimize it elsewhere. You do want to make sure that you are checking being specific product errors and warnings that you see in the Bing merchant center. Make sure you're addressing those because they will be different than what you're seeing happening with Google. And make sure you got you know a high approval rating for your products there. And then I would also say maybe just last one To double check your being smart shopping campaigns, just to make sure that the details that are driving those and the details that are feeding into the smart shopping campaigns and being are correct and accurate and fully fleshed out. So those are probably the big ones that I would call out. Aaron, do you want to push the button?

Aaron Conant 50:17

Yeah. And I see that we're almost at a time here. If there's any last questions, they can drop them in here, again, you know, thanks for everybody for sending over the great questions. I encourage, you know, Jordan, I don't know if you have like key takeaways to jump into. But I'd also encourage everybody, you know, joining the team of Coalition are just crushing it not just on SEO, but you know, what builds like anything, eCommerce, literally,

Jordan Brannon 50:44

yeah, if you need help, sort of understanding how this impacts you, if you're sort of, you don't feel like, you know, your current agency on the SEO or paid side of things is really sort of, you know, making an evaluation of AI in a meaningful way for you, you know, we are running a lot of tests, and sometimes we're finding value, and sometimes we're not, and we, you know, tend to be really focused on what the long term value will be. So definitely, we'd love to have that conversation. And we are a full service, we have a great design, development, reporting and analytics, Team content creation, you know, so we can really kind of help supplement in a lot of different ways. So maybe that's the big call out for us, I would say, again, get started considering what's happening with Microsoft and with being specifically be a little more proactive there, start running some some rank tracking performances, start running some ads. And then also, again, I think, by and large, the kind of LLM future of of search results is going to be very informational driven. And so start to consider how you can approach that with your current product catalog and website experience. You know, is there a way for you to improve sort of your informational relevance without sort of necessarily impacting the core audience that you have today. So those are maybe some of the big ones. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 52:00

And I just dropped if anybody, there's a variety of topics, we have Jordan on the podcast as well. You know, in a lot of these cases, we bring these same topics right to the podcast, so you can check those out, comes out every week, and we just kind of tackle the same things. Jordan, I think we should do a podcast specifically on this, I think it'd be very, very helpful to the community as a whole. With that, we're going to wrap up you know, today's you know, session here again, look for follow up email from us, I'd love to have a conversation with you. If you're looking you know, digital Strategy or trends, if you're doing any kind of like new service provider selection, or on the tech side, whatever it might be, just throw 30 minutes on a calendar with me and we can kind of run through it. You know, if you want to learn more about this as a whole don't hesitate, you know, reach out to Jordan as well. And with that, we're gonna wrap this one up. Everybody, take care, stay safe. I look forward to seeing you in a future event. Alrighty, thanks again, Jordan. Already with you.