Bing recently announced it will begin to show product data from Bing Merchant Centre in the Bing Shopping tab for free. Initially in the USA, with the UK and other markets to follow, following Google’s move earlier this year.
Microsoft announced on 17th August it would be opening up the Shopping tab of the Bing search engine to show free product listings, using data from Microsoft Merchant Centre (within the Microsoft Advertising platform).
“With the recent rapid shift of retail shopping from in-store to online, Microsoft Advertising is looking for ways to help our retail partners take advantage of this change. In addition to the sponsored listings on the Bing Shopping Tab, we’re excited to announce the availability of free Product Listings, which allow you to show your product offers for free on the Bing Shopping Tab starting in the USA and soon rolling out to other markets — United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. A wider selection of products allows you to engage with more shoppers online and provide users with more choices to find exactly what they are looking for. Product Listings are currently offered to those who have a Microsoft Merchant Center store with approved offers, and will ramp over the next month.”
I just wanted to summarise this for people wishing to understand more. These listings will take product data from merchant centre and display free/organic listings in the Shopping tab on Bing. The shopping results on the main search results page will still be ads/paid listings from shopping campaigns. Also, paid shopping results will still appear above/below these organic product listings in the shopping tab.
(images from Microsoft’s Blog)
As I detailed in my previous blog about the updates to Google Shopping, it’s also key here to make sure your product feed is as complete as possible, if like many retailers you’re importing your Bing feed directly from Google Merchant Centre, there shouldn’t be any further issues with this. For dedicated Microsoft Merchant Centre feeds, we recommend you review the feed requirements.
Recommendation
My recommendation is that you review your current product feeds and any diagnostic info in merchant centre to look at ways of improving the feed data to maximise your organic performance here, this will also benefit your paid campaigns. I’d also recommend any retailer who isn’t currently advertising on Bing, setup an ads account and a Microsoft Merchant Centre account sooner rather than later as this unlocks some potential free impressions/clicks for you products.