Microsoft Ads: A Decent Source of Garage Door Leads
Search advertising with Google Ads and Microsoft Ads is one of the quickest and in many cases most cost-effective garage door repair marketing strategies. Microsoft Advertising involves showing ads for your services on Microsoft’s Bing search engine – as well as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Microsoft Ads
Advantages
An advantage of using Microsoft advertising to get garage door business is that in many cases you can expect to get a lower cost per lead using Microsoft Ads versus Google Ads. There is generally a bit less competition for Microsoft Ads – which tends to make the overall cost per lead quite a bit less.
Disadvantages
A big disadvantage of Microsoft advertising is that the overall number of people using Bing according to statcounter, Bing gets only around 6.5% of all search engine queries in the United States versus Google’s 87%. That said, Microsoft Ads do also appear on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo search engines – bringing Bing’s Total to around 12.2% of all searches in the USA. Even combining all searches, this means that your Microsoft Garage Door Repair Ads will only get between 10% and 20% of the impressions and clicks that you’ll get from your Google Ads campaign.
Another disadvantage is that Microsoft Ads doesn’t have an advertising unit similar to Google’s Local Services Ads. You’ll have to stick with search ads – at least for now.
How Microsoft Ads Delivers you Garage Door Customers
You can see the search results on Bing when I search for “new garage door installation” near my location in south Denver.
You can see that there are 4 ads – highlighted in the purple box. You can sort of see the map pack without scrolling down. But the overall layout is very similar to Google.
Microsoft displays a section for ads up top (A) followed by a Map pack of businesses that are close to your location (B) followed by organic search results (C) – and then finally another section with more ads on the bottom (A).
When prospective customers search for your services, an ad will appear for your business. The prospect will click on your ad, and be brought to your website where you’ll have an opportunity to convert them into a customer.
When to Set up a Microsoft Ads Campaign for your Garage Door Company
Despite the lower search volume and slightly fewer advertising options, it does make sense to at least try Microsoft Ads when the time is right.
First set up your Garage Door Services Google Ads campaign. Fine-tune your ad campaign over a period of months until you’re getting a good return on investment for your marketing dollars.
Check out our post to learn how you can sign up for Microsoft Ads. Once you have your account established, you can fairly easily migrate your advertising campaigns from Google to Microsoft with the Microsoft Advertising Editor.
Microsoft Ads: Things to Know
Beware of the Audience Network
In the post about Google Ads, I mentioned that you’ll want to focus exclusively on showing search ads (not display ads). The same holds true for Microsoft.
Search Ads allow you to reach garage door customers at the moment they desperately need your services. Microsoft Search Ads allow you to do that.
You’ll have the option to advertise on the Micorosoft Audience Network – don’t do it. The Audience Network will show image ads for your garage door company – which are best suited for large companies that wish to participate in the branding of their business to improve name recognition.
Sites included on the audience network are sites like CBS Sports and Fox Business. An ad for your Garage door repair company on a sports site doesn’t make sense. When they’re on a sports or business site, they want information about sports or stocks – they’re not thinking about getting their garage door fixed.
Below is a screenshot of where Microsoft Audience Network Image Ads may appear (note there is no guarantee that this is a Microsoft Ad). The ads can appear in the top banner, along the side, or within the body of a web page. Note these ads are best suited for branding – here the advertiser is a huge company – Xfinity. This isn’t a great ad format or location for a garage door company.
Garage Door services are oftentimes emergency services. Unless you have dozens of employees across a large metro area, you’ll want to focus on search ads only – which have more of an emergency intent.
Use Lower Campaign Budgets and Bids
Since Microsoft only gets a small fraction of the searches as Google, you’ll want to make sure that the budget for your Garage door services campaigns is a small fraction of the budget for the campaigns in Google Ads.
Likewise, your keyword bids in Microsoft Ads should be significantly lower – I usually start at (-30%) what you’re bidding in Google. This is due to less garage door competitors actually running ads on Bing.
Keywords, Ads, and Location are Largely the Same
Luckily, your garage door keywords, ads and location targeting will largely be the same. You won’t have to reconstruct all of your garage door campaigns from scratch. You’ll be able to import your Google Ads campaigns using the Microsoft Advertising Editor. You’ll just have to closely analyze the result of the import to make sure that everything looks correct prior to running Ads on Microsoft Ads.
Wrap Up
Garage Door Companies should definitely consider running ads on Microsoft – but it is best to wait until your ad campaigns on Google have been optimized. The Microsoft Ads network provides a way to get in touch with an additional 10% – 20% of potential prospects, and you may find that your cost per lead is lower than what you can achieve with Google Ads.
The search engine platforms – both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads are continually changing. Contact us if you need help marketing your garage door repair business.
