In today’s highly competitive and fast-paced eCommerce landscape, online store owners face numerous challenges. One of them is the growing demand for personalized shopping experiences. Modern consumers expect tailored recommendations, relevant search results, and seamless navigation that caters to their unique preferences and needs. Generally, search engines struggle to deliver such personalized experiences due to limitations in analyzing vast amounts of data and understanding customer behavior.
By harnessing the power of AI, online store owners can address pricing, inventory management, managing ads, campaigns, and marketing strategies and unlock valuable insights, efficiency gains, and customer-centric features that can drive growth and success in today’s competitive eCommerce landscape. Here comes the new AI-powered search engine: Bing. In this blog we will uncover Bing’s innovative features, how to set up your eCommerce store on AI-powered Bing and transform your customers’ shopping experiences.
AI-powered Bing: An overview
Microsoft recently launched AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge web browser for mobile devices. The new Bing AI is powered by ChatGPT, providing answers to simpler or complex questions in a conversational manner rather than featuring too many search links.
In the new Bing Chat, also known as Bing ChatGPT, you can perform multiple tasks and interact with them simultaneously. Bing is a conversational AI-powered search engine and can provide more up-to-date responses.
Since ChatGPT only has data till the year 2021, it cannot provide answers to recent information. Still, the amalgamation of Microsoft Bing with ChatGPT enhances you with current information available on the Bing search engine.
Bing is acknowledged as the AI-powered Co-pilot of the web and is set to unlock new features for eCommerce. But as of now, with the latest advanced search feature, enterprises are all set to make shopping easier for customers intelligently.
What Bing offers for eCommerce businesses?
Search marketing is an effective way to promote your online business; for most enterprises, it means advertising it on search engines. The new Microsoft AI-powered Bing offers a potential audience across unique demographics that you may need help to target on Google or other search engines. In the US, Microsoft has claimed that the new Bing network reached 117 million U.S. users monthly, performing more than 7 billion searches.
Before understanding the Bing shopping campaigns and advertising, let’s look at some of the inventing features of new Bing that are crucial for eCommerce organic search.
#1. Better search
The new Bing offers an AI-powered conversational search experience that provides your users with more relevant and personalized results. It also shows results for general information and shopping recommendations like sports scores, stock prices, weather, etc., on a sidebar with comprehensive answers. This will allow users to make shopping decisions quickly.
#2. Simplified answers
Microsoft AI-powered Bing analyzes the results from across the web to find and summarize the answers users seek. It offers you solutions for complex searches in an interactive manner. You can even get detailed information without scrolling through multiple results.
#3. Interactive chat
AI-powered Bing offers a conversational tone of search and answers complex questions thoroughly. It allows you to filter your search queries by asking for more information, clarity, and ideas with links to immediately act on your shopping decisions.
#4. Intelligent product search
Intelligent search scans through buyer persona of user, product, and brand via machine learning and AI capabilities. It naturally implements machine learning to deliver more relevant results and relevant shopping solutions. Also, the Bing Search APIs enable you to web search, image search, news search, and custom search from billions of sources, enriching your experiences, and citing all the sources for contextual references.
#5. Custom visual search
Bing Commerce helps customers find what they want, even when they cannot explain their queries. Bing customizes visual search and is trained on images for your product catalog so customers can use their devices to shop the look. This leads to an increase in overall sales volume and traffic on your website.
#6. Personalized product recommendations
Microsoft Bing intelligence provides personalized and contextual auto suggestions for relevant products making shopping easy by delighting your customers and increasing order values for your eCommerce store.
How to use Bing for your eCommerce store- Steps to setup your store on Bing
Microsoft Shopping Campaigns in Bing allows you to engage more customers with your products and deliver superior eCommerce experiences. Also known as Product Ads, it presents products through custom images and pricing by putting users closer to making a purchasing decision even before they click.
Setting up an eCommerce store is easy on Bing Commerce. If you are importing your Google shopping data directly into your Microsoft Merchant Center, here are the steps you need to follow to set up your eCommerce store.
Step 1. Create Account
Firstly, you need to create your Microsoft Merchant Center Account. To perform this:
- Log in to your Microsoft Advertising Account.
- Click the ‘Microsoft Merchant Center button’ and set up an account.
- Verify your store with a destination URL; this may take up to 48 hours.
Step 2. Upload products
You can import your existing Google shopping data or create a new Bing Shopping feed. For the Bing shopping catalog, you need to:
- Upload new products to Microsoft Merchant Center.
- Set up all product attributes like price, gender, color, material, size, title, shipping charges, etc.
Step 3. Create an audience
Audience targeting helps you show advertisements for the correct search queries to the right people at the right time. After uploading your products on Bing Commerce, you must identify your target audience. Follow the steps below to create an audience:
- On Microsoft Merchant Center, click on manage ads, and select Reach your audience.
- In Reach your audience, select Create, then give your audience a unique name.
- Select the type of audience from different categories: Custom audiences, Combined lists, In-market audiences, LinkedIn profile targeting, Customer match lists, Dynamic remarketing lists, Remarketing lists, and Similar audiences.
Step 4. Create a Bing Shopping campaign
- From Microsoft Merchant Center, click on Create a Campaign and then select sell products.
- You can create a keyword strategy and set the priority levels for your Bing shopping campaigns. You can decide if the campaign should be a top, middle, or low-level priority.
Step 5. Turn on automatic updates
You can keep an inventory check and not advertise the products that are out of stock or sold. Turning on the automatic updates button from manage ads will help you avoid wasting your ad budget.
Transform shopping experiences for your eCommerce store with Bing
Using Bing for your eCommerce storefront allows you to seamlessly implement advertising technology into your overall strategy. Bing helps you in crafting unique shopping experience for your visitors and the opportunities for your brand in meaningful ways such as:
#1. Builds a successful campaign
Bing can help you align unique audience segments with relevant promotions, enhancing customer experience. To build a successful shopping campaign, you can include extensions such as:
- Microsoft Sitelink extensions: Sitelink extensions are additional links for your ads that take customers directly to specific landing pages on your website. These links then let you promote distinct products, services, or sections of your website and lead searchers to the correct information they need to learn more and take action.
- Microsoft Image extensions: Image extensions can help you promote products through creative images, raise brand awareness and improve the quality score of your ads. It allows you to add powerful visuals and get more relevant traffic increasing brand recognition.
- Microsoft Review extensions: Review extensions let you display a positive review or ranking by an independent third-party source directly in your ads. This builds trust and gives your ads a more significant footprint from quality customers.
- Microsoft Price Extensions: A pay-per-click extension that displays prices to users. It will only show ads listed at the top of the results page, improving potential relevance. Price extensions enhance click-through rates(CTR), driving more conversions.
- Microsoft Action Extensions: Action extensions let you add a call-to-action button to your ad, helping you achieve higher click-through and conversion rates.
#2. Reach your customers
Reach your target audience on Bing, who have higher purchasing power, spend more on online shopping, and are more likely to engage with advertisements to try new offers or products. Recently Microsoft has added a variety of innovative updates, such as:
- Local inventory Ads: It promotes products that are available in-store, targeting nearby customers across devices.
- Merchant promotions: It displays special offers on specific products or websites within products.
- Import Google Shopping Ads: With the Google import tool, you can quickly implement Bing shopping ads saving time and effort.
- Microsoft Prometheus Model: The new Bing has developed the Microsoft Prometheus Model, a new way of working with open APIs that allows a combination of more relevant, timely, and targeted results with improved information safety.
#3. Build smarter customer journeys
Through Bing, you can create personalized experiences using robust Bing Intelligence tools targeting audiences to improve campaign performance. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search is a cloud service with in-built AI capabilities that enrich cognitive skills and custom models to gain data-driven insights from content.
- It provides fully managed search as service capabilities to reduce complexity and scale easily.
- Azure cognitive search capabilities allow users to auto-complete geographical-based searches, filtering for rich user experience.
- Through semantic search capabilities powered by AI and machine learning models, it understands user intent to surface and rank the most relevant results.
- With built-in AI capabilities like OCR, keyphrase extraction, location, and people detection, you can easily structure data and gain data-driven insights.
#4. Effective SEO
Since the new AI-powered Bing has innovated the search experience through personalization, it provides more accurate and relevant results by identifying search intent rather than simply matching keywords. eCommerce businesses must also update their SEO strategies and understand AI language to stay ahead of the competition. Here are some tips Microsoft has forecasted on search behavior and SEO:
- Microsoft has applied the AI model to the core Bing search engine, allowing it to provide more accurate and relevant results. With advancements in search and content processing capabilities, businesses must create detailed and informative content, providing high value to users.
- Through Bing AI, users can execute keyword phrases that are more detailed and specific. To rank higher on Bing, you can focus on long-tail conversational keywords, use natural language to demonstrate authority on topics, optimize websites for voice search, and build a mobile-friendly website.
- Build your AI SEO strategies using search behavior of common questions visitors ask, and you can use it as blog subheadings or build FAQs section. Through Bing’s webmaster tool, you can make keyword research easier.
Ready to make the most of Microsoft Bing for your eCommerce store?
As technology evolves, enriching shopping experiences and delivering one-on-one digital experiences is vital. By setting up your store on AI-powered Microsoft Bing, you can leverage the capabilities of the new search engine and enhance your customer’s shopping experience. You can build a roadmap for eCommerce site development with a trusted digital commerce partner with experience across Adobe Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Our experts understand your unique business requirements and provide a sustainable online store development roadmap.
