Category: Bing

Bing will stop using the historical user-agent and transition fully to the new user-agents. In 2019, Microsoft Bing announced new Bingbot user-agent names that fit better with its evergreen Bingbot crawling and rendering service. Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel has now said that by the Fall of 2022 the old user-agent will stopped being used and the search company will transition to the new user-agents fully. Old user-agent. Microsoft said it will stop using its historical user-agent by Fall 2022. That user-agent looks like this: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) New user-agent. Bing will use a user-agent that identifies the specific…

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Are you using bid modifiers in your Bing Ads campaigns? Columnist John Cosley explains what bid modifiers are and how bid boosting works. Reaching the right audience at the right price is the goal for every advertiser, but that goal can be frustratingly elusive. Fortunately, there’s a powerful tool at your disposal to do just that: bid modifiers. Bid modifiers provide you additional control to ensure your ads are shown to the customers you care about most — and not shown to those you care about least — while helping you optimally manage to…

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Having done pretty well with predictions for basketball, tennis and soccer, Bing turns its prediction engine loose on the upcoming NFL season. NFL fans in Denver, Indianapolis, Green Bay and Seattle might be happy to know that Bing’s prediction engine has slated their hometown teams as the top seeds in the AFC and NFC this coming season. Those are some of the initial prognostications as Bing sets its prediction engine loose on pro football. The playoff predictions are part of the weekly power rankings Bing plans to publish each Tuesday at…

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You can now see live traffic cameras directly on Bing Maps. Bing has announced the addition of traffic cameras to their traffic maps on Bing Maps. Bing said they have added more than 35,000 traffic cameras across 11 different countries in Bing Maps. To see them, you need to turn on the traffic layer by clicking on the traffic icon. Then zoom into an area, and if a camera is available, you will see camera(s) show up. You can toggle the cameras on or off, if you like. Here is a screen…

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Are you making the most of the unique characteristics of each search engine? Contributor John Cosley explains paid search opportunities you may be missing. Each month, users conduct more than 100 billion searches on search engines globally. And every day, a portion of the searches they perform involve queries that have never been made before. Those facts are widely cited, but fewer marketers are aware that at least a third of all searches conducted are from query terms unique to each search engine, such as Bing or Google. (According to Microsoft’s,…

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Bing lays out their predictions for March Madness and gives you the schedule, teams and the live results for 2016. Bing has launched their smart answers in the search results for March Madness. You can now go to Bing and search for [march madness] to get the brackets. Bing will give you three options above the typical search results. Bing defaults to the current bracket results, a way to build your own bracket and, of course, their predictions of winners. Bing also provides the schedule and the teams playing in this year’s March…

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After years of waiting, Mac users finally get a native desktop editor for Bing Ads with all the features of the PC version. Bing Ads Editor (BAE) for Mac has long been the most highly requested feature on the Bing Ads user forum. Mac users got word in November that Bing Ads had started work on the Mac version for release in early summer 2016, and here we are. The team announced the beta version is available in the US at SMX Advanced in Seattle on Wednesday. The Mac version has parity with the PC version of Bing Ads…

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How can you use ad extensions to move potential customers further down the sales funnel? Columnist Mona Elesseily shares some tactical advice. Not only do ad extensions work to encourage immediate sales, but they can also be used to move consumers along the decision journey/buy cycle. In our work, we’ve effectively used ad extensions in many stages of the buy cycle, for instance: When searchers research products online (research stage) When searchers home in on a specific product When searchers want to see products in person/offline And, of course, when they are ready…

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Advertisers attempting Phishing attacks and pushing counterfeit goods continued to try to evade detection. Bing Ads released its report on actions it took to keep malicious and misleading ads and advertisers off the search results in 2016. Its systems rejected 130 million ads (fewer than the 250 million were rejected in 2015) and banned 175,000 advertisers (more than the 150,000 banned the prior year). Phishing ads, ads promoting tech support scams and counterfiet goods continued to be areas in which Bing continued to battle bad actors. More than 7,000 sites were blocked for…

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In 1955, NORAD’s number was mistakenly printed in a 1955 Sears Roebuck & Co. holiday ad. The organization has been tracking Santa ever since. Google’s not the only one with its eye on Santa’s whereabouts. For 61 years now, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has tracked Santa’s December 24 trip around the world. The practice started in 1955 when a Sears, Roebuck & Co. advertisement mistakenly included NORAD’s phone number to call Santa. According to NORAD’s website, the number dialed directly into the Commander-in-Chief’s operations hotline. “The Director of…

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