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Many online advertisers' perceptions of the Microsoft Ads platform, (formally Bing Ads) tends to be underwhelming at best. Ask any digital marketeer and they will paint a picture of the platform as a poorer cousin always playing ‘catch-up’, somewhat late to the party and never quite delivering what was promised. But, contrary to popular beliefs, the Microsoft market share is growing and there is far more to the platform now than just the aforementioned ‘Bing’ search engine. Whilst finding parity with Google Ads is usually the goal of any advertiser when starting out on Microsoft, I find the most interesting, exciting and quite frankly smartest way to optimise your Microsoft Ad campaigns is to move away from this mindset and instead, embrace some of the features that are unique to Microsoft Ads. These features are quite often underappreciated, underused and undervalued but can really give your performance on the channel that added kick. Plus, rest assured if they are underused by yourself then they are probably underestimated by your competitors too!
These extensions take the form of clickable buttons within a search text ad and provide the customer with an immediate call-to-action. There are around 70 pre-set CTAs to choose from, so you should be able to find the perfect driver for your vertical.
We’ve seen CTRs shoot up by over 20% by using action extensions & combined with the fact that these are super straightforward to set up, there’s no excuses they should really be on all your ads by now.
If you’re a brand with lots of shiny professional quality images at your disposal, trialling these extensions makes perfect sense. Whilst, they may not be strictly unique to Microsoft Ads (they’ve appeared & then disappeared under several guises & BETAs over on Google Ads) , they are currently available to all advertisers in the Microsoft platform. The extensions take the form of clickable images that accompany search text ads taking users to your choice of final URL. You can add a description for even more impact. They can help your ad stand out, increase your share of the SERP, promote your brand and also prevent irrelevant clicks.
So, if your product or service is visually appealing, think impulse purchases or luxury holidays, these are a no brainer.
Advertisers distributing their ads across the search partner network on Google will appreciate the frustration of not being able to assess and analyse performance on individual website placements. Enter Microsoft Ads. Over in Google, you can only apply website exclusions at account level, Microsoft Ads gives you the option to add these exclusions at campaign level. But, the clincher, unlike Google, you can pull up performance reports per campaign for all the insights on how your ads are faring and where they are being distributed. I’ve found that this little report is often a treasure trove of information, where you can instantly spot some budget-draining sites you’ll want rid of straight away and more often some top-performing sites you wish you could appear 24/7 on. You’ll find it in the Dimensions tab > Publisher Websites - happy excluding!
For advertisers, heavy ad scheduling on weekdays on desktop was the only clever-ish way to weed out potential B2B customers. But, alas, we are a nation of workaholics and tradesmen and flexible workers and ... well, honestly, it’s not a perfect solution. LinkedIn Targeting has the capacity to change all that. The Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn has led to this nifty new feature. Through the sharing of user data, advertisers can now leverage LinkedIn profile information to target their ads based on a potential customers Job Function/Title, Industry and even, if large enough, the Company they work for. It’s early days for this feature but we’ve seen conversion rates can be boosted by upto 40% by using LinkedIn targeting over non-targeted ads. If you know your customer well, adding some LinkedIn targeting to your marketing strategy may well be quite a business-savvy move.
Microsoft Audience Ads are native style responsive ads that span placements such as MSN.com and Microsoft Outlook. There are over 20 million unique UK visitors across these sites so it’s a fantastic way to complement any display campaigns you are running on other platforms. It also enables you to use Microsoft Ads to tap into an audience of customers who aren’t actively using Bing as a search engine but do browse popular Microsoft sites or use Outlook as an email client. You can also import pre-existing display campaigns from Google too and reuse assets you may have used on other platforms like Facebook to keep creating the campaigns nice and simple. To give your display campaigns that additional edge overlay some of the LinkedIn targeting mentioned above and you might be surprised at just how good the results can be!
If these features have given you some ideas on how to liven up your Microsoft Ad campaigns, check out more insights on our Microsoft Ads blog : https://www.mabo.co.uk/category/microsoft-advertising/
