New Bing – Looking Ahead with John Cosley | The Catalyst

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Welcome to the latest edition of The Catalyst! In today’s discussion, we’re thrilled to explore Microsoft’s chat-empowered AI technology, new Bing. Keep listening to learn how this technology impacts search and how marketers like you can optimize your campaigns. Joining us today is John Cosley, Senior Director of Global Brand Marketing at Microsoft.

What trends are you seeing in new Bing’s consumer engagement since its launch in February?

The engagement has been spectacular. While we have been iteratively growing over the years, new Bing gave us an incredible boost in engagement with Bing. And now we’ve crossed 100 million daily active users of Bing, which is an incredible milestone for us.

What’s really cool about it is that we’re seeing growth in a lot of different ways. This is partially expected and partially unexpected as users respond to this new experience. Roughly a third of our daily preview users are using the chat functionality daily, with more than 100 million chats over the last couple of months since it began.

And if you think about it, the mobile use cases of this product, especially the chat product, are tremendous. We see strong usage and growth there, with a 6x increase in our daily mobile active users. 

What I find incredibly exciting is that we’re seeing about 15% of people using the new Bing to generate new content and to create new ideas, which indicates that search is moving to more chat creation and answers types of experiences.

What actions should digital marketers take right now to make the most of new Bing?

We’re advising our agency, brand partners, and clients to lean into this as a strategic priority. Usage is growing, as evidenced by the numbers, and ads have been live in this experience since it launched.

And we’re constantly innovating regularly in, day over day and week over week, as we’re learning about new consumer behavior and changes in how they engage with the chat experience and the ads within it. 

So we want everyone to be thinking about how to utilize this strategically.

And we also are advising that we want advertisers to take advantage of their opportunity as we’re seeing this fasting, growing space. 

We don’t want people putting this in the innovation budget, or budget bucket, which oftentimes gets cut or is generally relatively small, and to keep it as part of their scaled and performance kind of media budget line item.

That way, they don’t hit a cap or put that at risk and are in a place to capitalize on the growth we’re seeing.

What do you see new Bing unlocking for advertisers?

We’re keeping an eye on four big areas that will add that value back to advertisers.

The first, which many advertisers are interested in and excited about, is more audience reach as complex queries can be understood at a greater depth and precision while usage grows. 

New Bing creates more extended customer reach opportunities on searches that were not necessarily monetizable before by ads think, like big long multi-query types of searches. In addition to the conversational aspect and strength, these broad queries can resolve more quickly down into actionable intent, which can help us drive better outcomes in helping to create surface areas for consumers to connect with new offers and products. 

And the second area is really about greater relevancy. 

The third area is around improved insights. We’re only just understanding how consumer behaviors will evolve in these new experiences and how that will unlock deeper audience, intelligence, and understanding in a changing consumer decision journey. 

Our goal is to help us create those insights and help inform our advertisers’ strategy to be more successful as consumers and to find powerful use cases for our chat and the new Bing experience.

The fourth is really what we might consider as your return on time spent in addition to your return on advertising spend.

And as we enter this new age of productivity and doing more with less, the power of this technology can help search marketers and advertisers be more efficient when feeling the pressure of getting more done with less. 

And that will help them improve not just their return on ad spend but their return on time spent as we think about implying these into automation and recommendation tools that help our marketers and our customers be successful.

Is it currently possible to target new Bing chat queries with ads?

For now, it’s very early days. We’re learning about how consumers are behaving, how consumers will use these things, and how CDJs will change all the things I’ve mentioned during our conversation. 

And so right now, there’s no way today to create campaigns or target queries for the chat experience.

Additionally, reporting isn’t currently broken out separately from your normal reporting and our platform with that new Bing chat experience. So our guidance and recommendations are to continue optimizing your campaigns for better performance. Those optimizations will feed into the new chat experience as well.

With limited controls, what should SEMs do to take advantage of new Bing’s chat experience?

Things that come to mind are keyword research and how these technologies can help to uncover new opportunities. It can help with reporting, especially as we think about some of its copilot capabilities. Every search marketer loves Excel – and the power there.

And while it’s not broadly available yet, the potential is super cool regarding the ability to ask Excel Copilot to help you collate and find insights and reports that are thousands or millions of rows long. 

So SEMs (search engine marketers) should definitely take advantage of Bing’s ability to help with ad copy, research, optimization, and creative. It gives you more options and ideas to work with, and it can help you test and optimize.

In addition to Search, how can GPT-4 assist across the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN)?

There are a few things that come to mind for me. 

For example, Our Microsoft Audience Network uses many search signals. You can think about our audience network being search intent driven for the need of advertising. 

This is helping us to deliver better audience understanding and telemetry. This affects how we extend what they’re doing on the search side to reach them in relevant ways through our native ad product.

Additionally, creative exploration comes to mind. Not just the written word aspect but the visual, creative side of things.

As you think about the integration of DALL-E with the Bing chat experience, that helps you get more creative visually. Marketers can optimize their creative and visual ad experiences that flow into our Microsoft Audience Network, which is a more visual-based sort of ad product.

And that can be a powerful tool as you think about the visual experience of your brand coming to life to drive that eye and catch engagement.

CONCLUSION

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We are constantly leaning into our Microsoft partnership to ensure our clients get the inside scoop on hot topics like new Bing and all things performance marketing. Are you interested in staying in the know and better informing your campaign strategy? Let’s make it happen. Reach out today.

This episode of the Catalyst was produced by Brad Costella and directed by Eden Pierson.

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Adlucent is the performance marketing agency that proves outperformance has no limit. Powered by our purpose-built platform, Deep Search™, Adlucent unifies the best of human and machine for a scientific approach to marketing. We work transparently in partnership with B2C and B2B retailers and brands to create custom, predictive programs that drive ever-better outcomes. Our services include paid search, shopping, social, retail media networks, display media, video, performance creative, consulting, and measurement. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adlucent is part of Advantage Solutions and ranked one of the top marketing companies in the U.S. by AdAge.