Bing Has Free Tools! Make sure you use them.

Microsoft Search (Bing) is becoming more relevant each day and as such it is a good idea to be familiar with all of the great tools that are available that will help increase your accounts performance on Bing.  It is especially important to know about all the free tools that can make managing your online search account more robust and relevant to users search queries.

We were previously familiar with the tool, but after reading this article about Microsoft Ad Intelligence, we decided we should jump on the band wagon and remind you why it’s so great.

This free tool is an add-in for Excel (2007 version only), but you must have a Microsoft adCenter account. The setup is free; however you need a credit card to put into the system. Most people do not use this tool because of these two criteria, but the information that it generates is very interesting and worth the effort to gain access to this data.

Microsoft adCenter gives you information based on actual Bing and MSN query data including:

• Relevance
• Volume
• Cost history
• Search-user age group
• Gender
• Geographical location

Additionally, the “Vertical KPIs” tool allows you to learn about how keywords perform in a specific business category and content vertical. This translates into the ability to predict expected cost and performance of your search/content campaigns. This tool is especially useful as Yahoo transitions to Microsoft Search (Bing). Microsoft is beginning to bridge the search marketing gap between itself and Google, so we all need to get most comfortable with the Microsoft search world.

-Kristina Zhao