Fresh out of the ovens of the Bing Ads products lab comes the Bing Ads Campaign Planner tool. This campaign optimization gem is accessible from the tools tab in the Bing Ads UI and provides keyword, product and category-level insight. Read on to get the insider’s information on what the Campaign Planner tool brings to the table, and come away with several powerful use cases that illustrate how you can integrate this tool into your SEM strategy today!

The only constant in search advertising is that data crunching is pivotal to success; review this list to discover the dimensions and data points that the Campaign Planner tool makes available to analyze keywords, products and keyword categories. Use these lenses to perform research, review trends and optimize your campaigns to the fullest:

• Dimensions:
  • Network (Bing and Yahoo owned & operated vs search partners)
  • Top states
  • Top cities
  • The past year vs the current year to date
  • The past 12 months, by month
  • The past 3 weeks by day of week
  • The past 28 days
  • Device: computer vs mobile vs smartphone share of overall traffic

• Performance statistics:
  • Total search volume
  • Device volume breakout %
  • % change in volume, past week vs trailing week
  • Ad impressions
  • Ad clicks
  • Avg marketplace CPC
  • Best position CPC
  • Top of page (mainline) CPC
  • Sidebar CPC
  • Marketplace CTR

Additionally the Campaign Planner tool provides the following functionality that can augment your powers of analysis and help you become an SEM rockstar:

1. Favorites – make the Campaign Planner tool a part of your daily routine by creating a list of the terms that matter most to you and stay up-to-date on marketplace trends.
2. Auction insights – check the competitive landscape for a category, drill-down into a specific bidded keyword or gather intel on keywords you’re considering to help you make an intelligent decision.
3. Categories – track performance at a bird’s eye view for the categories in which your company competes, such as jewelry, skin care, men’s clothing, tourist attractions & destinations, holiday & seasonal events and many more! Because category-level data provides aggregated trends, category research can help you make strategic decisions, such as identifying new categories to expand into or increase investment in.
4. Similar keywords – The Campaign Planner tool also provides a list of similar searches for a specified term, similar to the Bing Ads Intelligence tool’s keyword expansion option. Plugging this ability into all the aforementioned features and data points really makes the Campaign Planner tool an indispensable new addition to your SEM toolkit.

While all this functionality to make anybody’s head spin, here are 3 use cases that you can use the Bing Ads Campaign Planning tool for today:

• Identify top movers – with the week over week search volume % change, you can be the first to know when a new search term is rising through the ranks and add it as a new keyword or a negative keyword.
• Keyword expansion – search for your top performing terms and pick out similar searches to add as new keywords. Not only can the Campaign Planner tool help you discover great new keywords ideas, but it also provides actual, hard data rather than estimated searches or a search index score, making your research more accurate and reliable.
• Calculate your share of the market – Combine impression share reporting with your share of total marketplace clicks for your keywords to understand where the biggest opportunity exists (a lower impression or click share), which means your efforts are driving a higher ROI.

In a word, the new Bing Ads Campaign Planner is an essential new tool that you would do yourself a huge disservice to not make use of. When using the tool, be sure to sign into your Bing Ads account when using the tool in order to access all features such as competitive research. And keep an eye on the Bing Ads Blog to get the latest on search industry trends, seasonal insights and product updates like this one.

Thanks for following along! Feel free to ask questions, comment and add your own flavor of insight. Happy optimizing!