Delivering a ROAS of 28.11 (and growing!) with Microsoft Ads

As of February 2021, Bing has a global search engine market share of just 2.69% (with Google holding an astonishing 92.05%). Although the amount of daily searches is considerably less it doesn’t mean you can’t utilise the Microsoft Ads platform.

There are a wide range of factors that stop businesses from advertising on Microsoft ads such as lack of time management, having a limited budget or just believing that they will get better results from Google. Although these hurdles can be difficult to overcome, it’s important that businesses consider Microsoft Ads as a paid search platform.

As you can see from the data above, Microsoft ads should not be ignored and could even result in a better ROAS than Google.

First and foremost, what does ROAS mean?

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is a valuable metric that measures the amount of revenue your business generates from each pound spent. The higher the ROAS, the better.

Our biddable media strategists use ROAS as a fundamental measurement of how effectively a paid campaign is working. There are a number of other core metrics monitored alongside the ROAS, the most common being CPA or Cost per Acquisition. Whilst this is a useful metric for measuring the volume of conversions and the overall cost of achieving these conversions, it will only measure the average cost of a single action. ROAS allows you to assess the most profitable products and services and will allow us to put money in the right places.

ROAS benchmarks differ depending on the industry but typically they fall between 3 to 4. This case study illustrates how Zelst developed and implemented a Microsoft Ads strategy for our Health and Beauty client, which has capitalised on the overlooked platform and delivered a colossal ROAS of 28.11 (and growing)!

We have worked with our health and beauty client for over 7 years and our dedicated biddable media strategists have worked hard to develop their overall Google Ads performance.

In March 2019, the team made the decision to take the existing well-performing campaigns across to Microsoft Ads (previously Bing Ads) and expand their client’s reach and visibility into a platform that could give them a competitive advantage and an opportunity to boost sales even further.

"We have worked with Zelst for a number of years. Their willingness and ability to provide strategic direction for our ongoing campaigns make them valued partners . . . . and they are also, really nice people!

We have worked with the team on our various projects designed to improve our rankings in search, keyword performance, ROI within Google Ads and shopping feeds. We have found that they continually search for every opportunity to improve our standings within our very competitive market.

We can focus on the day to day running of our business needs, whilst knowing they are quietly achieving fantastic results that help us achieve our marketing goals."

Health and Beauty Industry
Managing Director

Our biddable media strategists have years of experience optimising and building high converting Google Ads campaigns and achieving high levels of ROAS over a range of industries. It was time to take their learnings and expertise, and replicate the same success in Microsoft Ads.

Over the last 2 years, the team has been able to maintain a Microsoft Ads ROAS of over 8. Whilst this was impressive in itself, based on the benchmarks mentioned earlier, our strategists felt the time was right to dedicate extra time and resources to develop and expand the campaigns already in place.

Over the first two months of 2021, the team decided to expand the number of campaigns whilst keeping the targeting closely focused on the client’s most profitable lines. Using the data the team has collected over the years across both the Google and Microsoft accounts, we were able to develop a shopping and brand campaign that is giving us great results. The shopping campaigns have been improved to only target the best performing lines across the site and using the past performance data we were able to exclude poorer performing product categories. This allowed us to spend our budget in the most efficient places and so far we are seeing great results.

The targeted expansion of the campaigns has resulted in an incredible ROAS of over 28. Yes, you read that right!

Microsoft Ads – 15th March 2019 to 28th February 2021

• Microsoft Ads Spend: £35,359.39
• Revenue: £291,724.43
• ROAS: 8.25

6 Month View – 1st September 2020 to 28th February 2021

• Microsoft Ads Spend: £7,903.60
• Revenue: £81,916.23
• ROAS: 10.36

1st Jan 2021 to 28th Feb 2021

• Bing spend: £1,212.46
• Revenue: £34,088.76
• ROAS: 28.11

This shows that although Bing is a search engine not many advertisers focus on, it definitely can work well for some businesses. Although there are 82 million searches on Bing each day (compared to Google’s 3.5 billion a day), it is definitely a search engine that should not be ignored when a ROAS of 28 can be achieved.