30 Days with Bing Ads

Roughly a month ago I received coupon in the mail for a trial of Bing Ads. I decided I'd
see what I can learn about people who search for my name. I
created a few different ads, and left everything else at default.

Basic statistics

In 30 days, my ads have shown up on 565 different sites with 20,984
impressions with an average ad position of 3.4. My ads have shown up in
the US, UK, and Canada. The keywords were my first and last name only.

Interesting discoveries

My name shows up on a few ISP NXDOMAIN interception sites. Meaning, when
the subscriber types in a domain which doesn't exist, the ISP intercepts
the invalid domain request and displays their own site loaded up with
ads. In this case, British Telecom, Verizon, Virgin Media, CenturyLink,
and T-Mobile displayed my ads in their results.

The Duck Duck Go search engine is ranked #5
for displaying my ads.

More detailed report

Here's a more detailed report on the first 30 days, 30 Days on Bing CSV Report

User tracking

What Bing Ads doesn't provide is client data about who searched or clicked
on anything. My ads link to my site with a "?bing" at the end of it, so
I know the clicks come through the ad itself. By parsing my logs, here's
some interesting users:

I suspect Bing stores all of this data itself, but doesn't share it. Or
I just haven't found the right report or settings to gain access to the
client data.

To be continued

I'm going to keep running the ads to see what I learn over time. Mostly,
as an experiment to learn who is searching for me and from where they
find me. A further experiment is to do more variation testing with the
ads to see what generates more clickthroughs to my site. Right now,
the doge ad seems to be winning.

originally published at wiki.lewman.is