What's the "Bing Rule" in Online Advertising Data?

The “Bing Rule” was coined by one of my favourite marketing analysts, Avinash Kaushik and I see it all the time in my advertising data. Here’s what it is and how it shows up in the numbers.

Transcript:

Someone I follow online is Avinash Kaushik, and he works at Google and he has an email newsletter that he sends out called the marketing analytics intersect. And this is just what it sounds like, how marketing and analytics and data work together. And I read every single one. It is super insightful and today's video was inspired by a concept that he coined and that term is the Bing role. And he refers to this as the smallest numbers having the highest percentage points. This came from an analysis of advertising data, where they noticed that often Bing was getting higher conversion rates over Google traffic. So Bing ads were sending better quality traffic than Google. And when business leaders noticed this, they were like, we need to put all of our money into Bing ads.

But what they didn't look at was the fact that Bing was getting them maybe a hundred customers. Whereas Google was getting them a hundred thousand. So even though the quality was there with Bing there just wasn't the same scale that they could get with Google. And so they just wouldn't be able to grow in the same way without Google ads. This concept is seen in a lot of different places. And I notice it all the time in Facebook advertising where one placement is doing really well, but the volume just isn't there, or maybe one audience is performing really well, but we just can't seem to scale it due to just supply and demand that audience is really high-performing, but it's maybe just not big enough to really scale and grow that in the way that we want to.