Recently, I added Google Shopping campaigns for one of my clients’ PPC efforts. After seeing their success, when the client asked me about ways to expand, I mentioned giving Bing Shopping a try. With their approval, I started the process of getting them set-up.

Here are the steps I took so you can quickly and easily follow the same steps if and when you’d like to test Bing Shopping. I’ll start from scratch assuming that you haven’t set-up anything yet in Bing.

4 Steps to Setting Up Bing Shopping

1. Claim Your Domain

Previously, you could only claim your store domain with Bing Webmaster Tools. This could be tricky depending on the accessibility of your login information and involves multiple steps. It’s the option you must use if you have less than 50 events recorded on the domain at the time of set-up. Otherwise, a few months ago, Bing shifted to allow a store to be created via Universal Event Tracking (UET), if you have it enabled. You can’t create your store unless you have this step completed first.

2. Store Creation

To get started, in Bing Ads, got to Tools > Bing Merchant Center > Create store. Complete the information in this above screenshot.

Take note that the store name cannot be changed once it’s created, so be careful and accurate. How the store name appears here is how it will appear in your product ads. Also, destination URLs must also follow formatting rules, such as starting with a protocol (http:// or https://).  Lastly, you can have multiple stores as long as you don’t sell the same products via multiple stores.

3. Upload Catalog or Feed

Once your store has been created, click on the store from Tools > Bing Merchant Center.  From there, you can either create a catalog, upload a feed or import from Google. Since most PPC folks will have set-up shopping already in Google Adwords before getting started in Bing, let’s focus on the Import option.

1. Go ahead and sign-in to Google using the login associated with the Google Merchant Center account. If there is only one store associated with this login, then it will automatically be selected. If there are more, then you’ll be able to select which store you’d like associated with the import.
2. Create your catalog here in Bing first before you can import it from Bing. Click “Create new catalog” and complete the information. You can create as many as you need.
3. Determine the specifics of your feed import. Your feed must be updated at least every 30 days or it will expire. Generally, you want to set your feed to update as often as your Google feed does.
4. Click continue and confirm that all of your import details are correct. In the next screen, you’ll see confirmation of the import. You can revisit this screen if you need to make changes to your import schedule.To see the import details, click over to Catalog management and click on your catalog. This is a good double check because, as you can see, I have some warnings to address.

Create Shopping Campaigns

You can create shopping ads by creating a new campaign and selecting the goal of “Sell products from your catalog”. The interface will walk you through the remaining steps.

Again, let’s focus on how to import our Shopping campaigns from Adwords for this post. There are two ways you can import Shopping Campaigns into Bing Ad: importing in the interface or via Bing Ads Editor. I recommend importing via the interface since your Bing Merchant Center Store will already be found there. You can also edit many of the settings to ensure the import goes exactly as you’d like it to.

When the import is completed, be sure to double check if there are any errors in the Import Summary.

One thing that alarmed me was that I saw an error at the ad group level. Don’t worry, this is normal and just indicates that Bing Ads needs more time to find the products. Traffic from product ads should start within 3 to 5 days. If not, reach out to Bing Ads Support for help regarding your Shopping Campaigns.

That’s it! I hope to be able to share with you soon how Shopping Campaigns perform in Bing for this client.

And, if you didn’t catch it already, check out our post about the new goal-optimized shopping campaigns in Adwords.

Have you had success with Bing Shopping? Comment below to share!