Advertisements have reached an all-time high in just the past couple of years. But with so many options, it becomes a tedious and confusing task to choose one. Let’s decode one such advertising platform today. The Microsoft Advertising platform provides sponsored ads for search engine results across the Microsoft Search Network. Small businesses bid for ad placement in the results that appear when users search on the Microsoft Search Network. The Microsoft Search Network connects you with customers in your service area while they search online for topics related to your business on Bing, Windows 10, Cortana, and Office using any device. It also includes our exclusive publisher partnerships, extending our reach to readers who visit AOL, The Wall Street Journal, Gumtree, InfoSpace, and more. With one ad buy through Microsoft Advertising, you can reach 23 million unique searchers on the Microsoft Search Network who represent 147 million monthly desktop searches. This accounts for 8.2% of the search market in India.
How does it work?
- Creative ads tailored to suit your specific needs.
- Customized ads to grab customers’ attention.
- Allows fine-tuning of ads and bids to capture customers who are searching on different devices.
- Targeting local customers to promote better marketing relationships.
- Customer activity tracking post clicking on your ad to discover which pages and features on your website are most popular.
What are the perks?
Another question worth knowing the answer to is ‘How is Microsoft advertising better?’Microsoft has an edge over other competitors like Google with features like
- Microsoft’s ad scheduling is based on the location of the person viewing the ad. This makes the job simpler for the advertiser because just one ad campaign does it all. So if you schedule just one ad, it could still target all time zones in Asia. You could keep the hours from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and not have to have several campaigns to execute this.
- Lower cost per click, thus lowering the conversion costs.
- Partner-specific targeting of ad groups makes a big difference in the optimization of campaigns for maximum performance. Options are separating the partners by “owned and operated” (e.g.: Bing, AOL, and Yahoo search) and “syndicated search partners” (websites in certain locations).
Depending on which partner performs better for your campaign, it is possible to target only that or pick all as a lump category.
- Better conversion rates in some instances.
- A more extensive list of in-market audience layers availability. What this means is that, if you want to bid differently to different groups of users, depending on their readiness to buy in a specific category of products or services, Microsoft Ads allows advertisers to add these in-market audiences to set campaign categories. For example, Microsoft has a “Social” category with subcategory options, like “Romance & Relationships” or “Takeout & Delivery.” And there are several other categories or subcategories available to make your ad targets highly specific.
- The better customer support offered can be beneficial for small business owners.
What’s new with Microsoft Advertising?
With the rapid growth of programmatic advertising, there is also a rising concern for brand and customer safety. Microsoft has teamed up with Integral Ad Science (IAS) to provide safety to brands through verification on all Microsoft-owned and operated platforms.
Let’s break it down further. This feature pre-screens all content before the ad is marketed. When any content is regarded to be of moderate or high-risk level, it is automatically omitted from the advertising inventory. IAS’s standard set of risky content categories is Adult, Alcohol, Gambling, Hate Speech, Illegal Downloads, Illegal Drugs, Offensive Language and Controversial Content, and Violence.
We have only mentioned a few of the noteworthy features, but I’m sure there are plenty more we could talk about. Ultimately, the best advertising platform for you can only be determined by the objective and target audience of your ad campaigns. But, Microsoft has definitely stepped up their game with this new feature, and has become an option definitely worth exploring.
