If you’ve read our piece on SEO for Bing and Yahoo, you’ve probably already asked your website manager to have the Bing bot crawl and index your site. (If you haven’t, here are five reasons why you should.) Yahoo and Bing have their own pay-per-click (PPC), aka cost-per-click (CPC), program as well. It works pretty much the same as Google’s AdWords, but is it worth allocating a budget to? The short answer is yes because it will increase your online visibility while lowering costs.
First, let’s talk about why these two search engines, also known as the Yahoo Bing Network (YBN), are necessary to help you sell more cars. YBN is the default search engine for Windows, Firefox, and Siri. Considering the steady increase of mobile device usage, namely smartphones and tablets, that’s a huge number of potential car buyers who will be exposed to your ads.
Furthermore, Baby Boomers have been found to prefer Bing and Yahoo over Google. As a demographic with a lot of buying power, it’s worth marketing to their preferences. These search engines are steadily growing and as of a 2016 study, they account for 80% of all car-related searches. Yes, all automotive-related searches on the web.
This does not mean you should move all of your CPC bid money to Yahoo and Bing. That would be silly because Google, as a search engine, is still powerful. Instead, your marketing team should create a new campaign for YBN and test the waters. Advertising on these two is significantly less expensive than on Google, partially because the competition is less dense. With the chance of getting better placement as well, this can be the missing piece you need to flourish. Our biggest tip, though, is make sure that you have a simple and efficient way to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison of these campaigns. Otherwise, you won’t be able to determine whether the ROI is in the green or not.
If you’ve mentioned this to your current PPC manager and they’ve been skeptical, maybe it’s time to see what else is out there. Drop us a line and let us show you how we run our program, which includes ads on YBN. Selling tens more cars a month is worth an hour of your time, don’t you think?