The Hangover was released, The Crazy Frog was about to reach number one and this rather alarming Daniel Craig shaped ice-cream was The Daily Telegraph’s picture of the day.

But for the digital marketer, the most interesting event on this day in 2009, was the launch of Bing. Whilst it is often overlooked, Bing can be the search marketer’s secret weapon when used correctly. 

Bing offers great value for money. In fact last year, we saw that Bing Ads had an average CPC of $.78 compared to $.93 on Google (Q3 2014).

In direct comparisons of verticals, Bing had a CPC equal to or lower than that of Google in seven of out of eight. In verticals with an older target market, Bing can be even more effective as its users are traditionally weighted towards a higher age than Google’s, especially 55-64 year olds. 

But cost isn’t everything. Allowing advertisers to optimise their campaigns is essential.

Earlier this year, Bing announced changes to offer advertisers a more streamlined way to target searchers, irrespective of the device they are using to search.

It allows marketers to adjust bids within a single campaign for targeted devices instead of creating separate campaigns for each device. The Bing Mobile Relevance Team also recently announced it will be tagging results links with a “Mobile Friendly” icon to keep pace with Google’s mobile offering.

The latest figures show that in the UK, Google has a market share of 89% with Bing owning 6%. But as Google’s growth slows, Bing’s slice of the pie is increasing.

The younger brother boasts a near 20% rise in the UK over the last 12 months and one in five of US-based desktop searches were made using Bing, according to comScore’s March data.

It would therefore make sense for advertisers to invest search budget proportionally across these two search engines.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen that advertisers don’t always give Bing a fair chance as they feel its isn’t worth the effort. But the time needed to manage campaigns across both Google and Bing can be drastically cut by using a cross-channel performance advertising cloud.

Advertisers can set automated alerts to identify when keywords are under-performing, regardless of which search engine account they belong. Advertisers can also optimise keywords from both Google and Bing in the same user interface, eliminating the need to duplicate campaign management efforts.

When adding new keywords or ad copy, some platforms allow search marketers to accomplish this in one step across multiple search engines via the campaign copy feature – simply create the campaign in one engine and copy it to the other with just a few clicks.

Its life has been fascinating to watch unfold, and on its anniversary today, we can see that Bing is a bit of a birthday surprise. We hope advertisers can take full advantage of the possibilities it presents and wish the search engine another year of success.