Bing Ads Introduces Performance Comparison Graphs

The Bing Ads UI has long been plagued by obfuscation. Yes, there have been improvements such as the addition of performance trends and change history visualization, but there hasn’t be a way to compare performance data without downloading, formatting  and analyzing reports on your own. Finally, Bing Ads is working on a solution.
Today the company announced it’s working on new performance comparison feature to:

• Compare your current performance to that of a previous period.
• Compare your performance with the MOVING AVERAGE, a reliable performance baseline to measure the success of your campaigns against.
• Compare your performance between weekdays and weekends.
• See performance comparison in the context of change history.

The new feature , now in pilot mode, follows the same layout as the current performance trend with the addition of a “Comparison range” drop down with three options: Previous period, same period last year, moving average.

Both the ability to see performance by Moving average and the shaded Weekend markers are features that are unique to Bing Ads and not seen in Google AdWords.
Moving Average is calculated by averaging the performance metrics across the previous 4 days. All 4 days are of the same day of the week as the original day:

The Moving Average represents the “normal” performance level that can be used as a baseline to measure your daily performance, because it smoothes out the random fluctuations in the comparison trend line, and it also takes care of the “day of the week” factor. It answers advertisers’ frequent question, “how did my campaign do on day x compared with a typical day of the same day of the week?”

The comparative views will be added to the Change History tab as well.
If you’re interested in participating in the pilot, send requests to CHPilot@microsoft.com.