Microsoft Ads, formerly known as Bing Ads, allow you to advertise your brand on Bing and its partner networks (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Outlook, Xbox and Windows). It is a pay-per-click advertising tool, with over 653 million monthly users!
If you’re looking to increase sales and brand awareness, Microsoft Ads provide some excellent options. While Google owns 72.94% of the global search market, Microsoft comes in second with 11.22%, but with over 1 billion users per month, it is hugely underrated!
Here are the Microsoft Ad Specs you need to get started.
Let’s look at Microsoft in numbers:
- $12.2 billion in revenue from search ads
- Average CTR of 1.25%
- ¾ of users are over the age of 35
- 22% more purchases are made on Bing compared to any other search engine
Microsoft Ad Campaigns
There are 9 types of Microsoft Ads:
- App Install Ads
- Expanded Text Ads
- Dynamic Search Ads
- Microsoft Advertising in Bing Smart Search
- Microsoft Audience Ads
- Multimedia Ads
- Product Ads
- Responsive Search Ads
- Vertical Ads
Microsoft Ads are placed above organic search results, on every page of your website. They can also be shown on the right side of your website pages, with CTAs or product pages.
microsoft ad types
Expanded Text Ads
Expanded Text Ads were discontinued in February 2023, and you are no longer able to create new expanded text ads, or edit existing ones. Existing expanded text ads will continue to be displayed and you can still monitor their performance, pause or remove them. Their function is to display compelling and informative text, driving engagement and conversions. Check out Responsive Search Ads as an alternative!
App Install Ads
If you are looking to boost your mobile app downloads, this is the ad type for you. App Install Ads are similar to Expanded Text Ads, except when they are clicked they send your audience to your app’s page on the Apple App store or Google Play Store. These ads are great for reaching relevant audiences, and driving app installs, as your ads contain a direct link to your apps.
Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads look like Expanded Text Ads but they’re automatically targeted towards relevant search queries. Instead of choosing specific words, Microsoft looks at your web pages, generates personalized ads and delivers targeted messages to your potential customers based on your web pages. It is Microsoft’s most powerful advertising solution to target relevant search queries. This can save so much time by eliminating the need for keyword lists and customizing ad titles. It is great for maximizing engagement and yields high conversion rates!
Microsoft Advertising in Bing Smart Search
Microsoft Advertising in Bing Smart Search is currently only available in the US, UK, Canada, France and Germany. These ads are what you see in the display of smart search results in Windows 8.11. They are specially designed for touch screens, providing an engaging experience for your audience.
Microsoft Audience Ads
Microsoft Audience Ads, also known as Bing Display Ads, are currently only available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany. These ads cater to search advertisers, allowing you to connect with your audience and create engaging ad experiences that merge with the surrounding page content. You can customize who sees your ads based on demographics, interests and behaviors. Audience Ads offer two types of ad formats: image based (designed to adapt based on the audience viewing them) and feed based (designed for shopping campaigns using a product feed containing your product information).
Multimedia Ads
Multimedia Ads contain both images and visuals to grab your audience’s attention, and are displayed on websites owned by publishers. They show your brand and products, using large visual elements to increase traffic and sales on your website. These ads appear in mainline and sidebar positions. You can manually create ads, apply recommendations from Microsoft Advertising, or copy responsive search ads to Multimedia ads, depending on how much time you have to dedicate to ad creation!
Microsoft Product Ads
Microsoft Product Ads, also known as Microsoft Shopping Ads, showcase your products using images and text. You can add multiple country targeting and custom labels for each product, marking them as best sellers or special offers etc. To boost the performance of these ads, there are some strategies we recommend you follow. Set your campaign priority levels – pick from low, medium or high depending on how frequently you want each campaign to be shown. Adjust bidding for your top-performing products. Create tailored audiences to narrow down your targeted audience (and avoid unnecessary spending!) Set up remarketing audiences, and use UET tags to understand what visitors do after they click on your ad. These ads lead to increased engagement, higher CTR and improved conversion rates!
Responsive Search Ads
Responsive Search Ads are created to fit what customers are looking for when they’re searching. They provide multiple headlines and descriptions that Microsoft Advertising will automatically assemble, showing a relevant and compelling ad for every search query. This makes creating ads much easier and more effective, saving time and increasing ad engagement! Not only that, but their intelligence system automatically identifies the top performing ads and filters out ineffective ones! Images are automatically taken from your website, so you don’t have to add them manually. You can add up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, displaying the best of your brand and product information!
Vertical Ads
Vertical Ads are the newest ad type Microsoft Advertising offers. They generate personalized ads aimed at industry verticals. They are super easy to set up, don’t require keywords, and operate in addition to existing Search Text Ads. Microsoft AI generates ads to improve CTR and lower CPC rates, helping you to improve ad performance and achieve better results!
Microsoft Ad Specs
There are 3 types of advertising formats offered by Microsoft: Display, Native and Video ads.
Display Ads
These are visual ads in the form of images, interactive banners and video content. Their purpose is to capture the viewer’s attention and drive traffic to your landing page. They must include a 1 pixel border (gray or black recommended).
Main Image Dimensions:
- Mobile banner: 320×50 px
- Inline rectangle: 300×250 px
- Half-page: 300×600 px
- Skyscraper: 160×600 px
- Billboard: 970×250 px
- Leaderboard: 728×90 px
- Xbox Home: 416×216 px
- Xbox Store: 468×263 px
- Xbox Video Gallery: 19020×1080 px
Backup images:
- File type: GIF, JPEG
- File size: 50-250 KB
- Dimensions: 300×250, 728×90, 300×600, 970×250, 320×50.
HTML5 files:
- Size: 100-500 KB
Videos:
- Duration: 15 or 30 seconds
- Size: 1.1 or 2.2 MB
Native Ads
These are designed to match the look of the surrounding content and provide a less disruptive experience for users. They are often presented as sponsored articles, recommended content or in-stream ads. They drive engagement, CTR and CPA to enhance your campaigns performance. There are three types of native ads: MSN, Outlook and Microsoft Audience.
MSN Ads:
- Image type: GIF, JPEG, PNG
- Aspect ratio: 1.91:1
- Size: 200KB max
- Logo: GIF, JPEG, PNG. 1:1 ratio, 600KB max.
- Title: 25 characters max
- Brand Text: 25 characters max
Outlook:
- Image type: JPG
- Dimensions: 150×150, 300×300, 100×100 or 50×50 px
- Descriptions: No character limit, only 40 characters will be displayed.
- Title: No character limit, only 38 characters displayed
- Sponsored brand text: 25 characters max
- URL: No character limit
Microsoft Audience Network:
- Image type: JPEG or PNG
- Dimensions: 703×368 min, 1200×628 max
- Short headline: 30 characters
- Long headline: 90 characters
- Ad text: 90 characters
- Business Name: 25 characters
- URL: 1024 characters
Videos:
- File size: 2GB max
- Video file type: MP4 or MOV
- Bitrate: 15000+ kbps for MP4, 42000+ kbps for MOV
- Resolution: 1280×720 or 1920×1080
- Duration: 15 or 30 seconds
- Aspect ratio: 16:9
Video Ads
There are three categories of video ads: Microsoft Invest, Microsoft Advertising Platform, and Third Party Advertising.
- File size: 2GB max
- File type: MP4, MOV, WEBM, MKV, VOB, OGV, OGG, AVI, QT, WMV, RM, ASF, M4P, M4V, MPG, MP2, MPEG, MPE, MPV, M2V, 3GP, 3G2, SWF, and TS (MP4 is preferred)
- Video bitrate: 15000+ kbps for MP4
- Resolution: 1280x720px or 1920×1080 px
- Duration: 6-60 seconds (15 or 30 is preferred)
- Audio bitrate: 192+ kbps stereo
- Aspect ratio: 16:9
our best Microsoft Ad tips
Optimize Keywords
Find what your audience is searching for, using the Keyword Research Tool provided by Microsoft. Familiarizing yourself with your audience helps to identify their preferences and tailor your ads towards them. Filter the keywords you’re currently using, and find which ones are in need of optimization. Don’t forget to add negative keywords to optimize your campaigns. Exclude words and phrases that aren’t relevant, focusing only on relevant searches.
Import your high-performing Google Ad campaigns
If you’re already using google ads, this saves time and allows you to copy your successful campaigns straight over to microsoft.
Analyze your performance reports
Checking performance and audience targeting reports allow you to maximize conversions and increase your ad visibility.
Experiment with your Bid strategies
You should choose your bid strategy on a case-by-case basis. There are 6 strategies available: Enhanced CPC, Maximize CLicks, Target Impression Share, Maximize Conversions, Target CPA and Target ROAS. Decide what your main objectives are and choose the big strategies that work best to optimize them.
Make the most of targeting
Target customers based on location, device, time and day, gender and age.
Set up the Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag
This provides insight into user behavior after clicking on your ad
Check your quality score
The quality score indicates how competitive your ads are by measuring relevance in relation to customer search queries. It ranges from 1-10, 10 being the highest. If your score is low, focus on improving it to ensure your ads are delivering optimal results
why Microsoft Ads?
Microsoft Ads appear across multiple sites, and have extremely detailed targeting options – improving ROI and increasing your conversion rates. Microsoft Ads also allow you to target an audience based on information from LinkedIn, such as companies, industries and job functions.
Microsoft currently has Performance Max campaigns in open beta. This is an asset focused campaign, saving time by adding assets to a group rather than manually creating ads one by one. Microsoft AI will determine which assets and audiences are best for your ads based on your campaigns, capturing the attention of potential customers.
Many advertisers are using Microsoft Advertising to gain a competive advantage, as it is still a space where many competitors are less active. This competition ensures that search results remain free from manipulation, keeps the prices down and provides better search options.
Microsoft Advertising is slowly becoming more popular in the marketing space, so now is the time to get ahead of the competition and maximize your audience engagement, brand reach and conversion rates!
