How Much Does a Booked Job Cost from Bing PPC for HVAC Contractors?
Introduction
Google gets all the attention from a search engine perspective and for good reason: it’s responsible for 86.6% of the global search market. But the name of the game with marketing is to find undervalued attention and Bing should be in consideration given that it has 6.7% of the global search market.
You likely have a lot of competition in your market for Google organic and paid ads, but Bing usually looks a lot different:
If you go to Bing right now and type in plumber near me or hvac near me I bet that you’ll see Home Advisor, Angi or Roto-Rooter in the type 3 of the search results.
This means there is opportunity to get your business on a channel that 6 out of every 100 potential customers use with little-to-no competition.
If that doesn’t sound enticing, let’s look at some revenue data to see how much revenue Bing brought in from November 2021 - June 2022 for 15 HVAC contractors.
Bing Generated $1.655 Million in Sold and Closed Revenue Across 8 Months
Bing brought in $206,875 in revenue per month from paid leads across those 8 months for a total of $1.655 million.
Compared to Google, Bing accounted for 12.4% of sold and closed revenue from all PPC leads despite the macro stat of Bing having about 6% of the traffic as Google.
For reference, Google brought in $11.6 million in sold or closed revenue for that same time period.
While Google should take priority as part of your marketing strategy (that’s where the majority of the attention is), you could be leaving revenue on the table if you are not also marketing on Bing.
74% Of Bing Revenue Was from New Customers
Perhaps the most compelling statistic from our analysis of 1,636 paid Bing leads was that seventy-four percent of the revenue generated came from new customers (yes, this even surprised me).
When evaluating the performance of a marketing strategy, revenue generated is a core KPI, but almost as important is revenue from new customers.
Not only did Bing account for 12.4% of the total sold and closed revenue generated from search engines, it also had a higher percentage of revenue from new customers (74%) compared to Google (59%).
Google has the volume advantage, but Bing is a channel that your competitors likely aren’t advertising on that you could expect to increase total revenue generated by 12% while getting a higher percentage of new customers.
New customers are so important because when you perform work, their neighbors see your trucks. If you do a good job, they’ll probably tell their neighbors, friends and family the next time someone asks for a recommendation.
Bing offers an advertising channel with less competition that tends to punch above its weight in returns all while generating a higher percentage of new customers to your business.
It Cost $354.96 to Get a Sold or Closed Job from Paid Bing Leads on Average
It’s about 8% more expensive to get a sold or closed job from paid Google PPC ($384.28) than it is from Bing ($354.96).
This speaks to less competition on Bing than Google.
8% might not seem like a big difference, but it’s $29.32 per job, meaning the 445 booked jobs tracked as part of this analysis cost $13,047 less than they would have on Google.
The average ticket for those jobs from Bing were $3,730.33 versus Google, which was at $3,165.02.
Bing PPC Brought in a 10.5x ROAS
During the 8-month period, Google PPC brought in an 8.2x return on ad spend (defined as sold and closed revenue divided by ad spend) and Bing brought in a 10.5x return on ad spend.
To simplify it even more, for every $1 spent on Google PPC, it generated $8.20 in return.
For every $1 spent on Bing, it generated $10.50 in return.
You shouldn’t be thinking about either/or when it comes to spending on search engines, you should be thinking about and.
Google and Bing can help you reach your customers and convert business, not Google OR Bing.
Conclusion
We’ve been excited about Bing for 2+ years because there just isn’t as much competition as there is on Google. This resulted in an 8% lower cost of revenue acquisition, a $600 higher average ticket, and 74% of the sold and closed jobs coming from new customers.
Yes, Bing generated 12.4% of the total sold and closed revenue while Google dominated with the other ~88% but if you’re looking to make your business better 1% each month, why not spend on the channel?
If you know your return on ad spend from Google PPC and your lead volumes, use these benchmarks to predict what you could get from Bing.
If Google PPC generates $30,000 per month in sold and closed jobs, you could expect Bing to generate at least 12% of that ($3,600) if not more.
We will keep running data studies like this as our data set grows, but the key takeaway here is not to ignore Bing PPC as a channel for revenue generation :)
Until next time . . .
-Jon