Few days back, Bing Ads was officially rebranded as Microsoft Advertising. This rebranding marks a new evolution in the advertising platform, signaling a strategic move to expand their portfolio of services in Marketing, CX, Search and AI. Clearly, AdTech customers can finally think of leveraging something that is not just Google anymore for their advertising campaigns.

To help you understand how Microsoft Advertising can generate great results for your business, read this article.

What is Microsoft Advertising?

Microsoft Advertising, earlier called Bing Ads, is a powerful combination of Big Data, Automation, and AI at your fingertips. Though rebranded as a mere name change, the evolution spells an important chapter in the history of Advertising Technology and the role of Microsoft in making every ad more personalized and connected to customer’s choice.

Here are the 7 important things you should know about Microsoft Advertising in its current version.

New Identities

• BingAds.com is now MicrosoftAdvertising.com
• Bing Ads Partner Program is now the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program

Google AdWords versus Microsoft Advertising

Google Search accounts for 3.5 billion searches per day. Compared to this mammoth number, Microsoft Ads are hugely underutilized. Since Google promises advertisers of high-quality ad traffic, engagement and conversions, most users believe Google AdWords is the only one who can deliver on their ad budgets. However, Microsoft Ads still rakes in 4 billion searches per month; capturing 24% of the US search market. Which means, if you are only focused on Google and its related platforms, you are missing out on a huge chunk of your search engagements for advertisements.

That’s why you now have Microsoft Shopping campaigns and Microsoft’s Universal Events Tracking (UTM) system as a cheaper (preferable for most) option to Google’s advertising offerings.

What is Big Data for CMOs — and why is it critical to modern marketing?

Growing the Bing Audience Network

The Bing Network forms 34.7% of the US Desktop search and 21% of the UK desktop search markets.

Businesses of any size can leverage The Bing Network Audience to make intelligent connections with the right audiences. All you need to do is leverage Microsoft Advertising to check for Audience Size, Market Share and Monthly Desktop Search in each geographical region.

Universal Events Tracking (UTM) system

When you create an online advertising campaign in Microsoft Advertising, you can see numerous business-specific metrics. Some of these metrics are related to brand awareness, lead generation, newsletter subscriptions from ads, app downloads, sales and engagements, and maintaining loyalty.

Would you like all people inside the account to see your ads or just the stakeholders?

Universal Event Tracking (UET) is a mechanism for advertisers to report user activity on their websites to Microsoft Ads. This is achieved by installing one site-wide tag. This tag records what customers do on your website then Microsoft Ads starts collecting that data allowing you to track conversions (like purchases or leads) or target audiences using re-marketing lists.

Expanded Connectivity and Reach with Microsoft Search Network

Microsoft Advertising is making search user-friendly. Microsoft Search Network is an important part in making this happen. MSN is basically rebranded with customer-centric technology for powering the devices, apps and sites that are frequently used by the customers.

The Greatest Choice You Can Give Consumers

Online and Mobile app searchers can find the Microsoft Search Network on Bing and partner sites, through Windows 10, Cortana and Office. In addition to these, there are third-party platforms and partnerships that makes search inside Amazon’s devices, web results for Siri and Spotlight Search on Apple devices, or maps on thousands of leading websites.

Welcome Microsoft Shopping Campaigns

Microsoft Shopping Campaigns allow users you to organize, manage, bid and report on Product Ads. Product Ads are created from the content of your Merchant Center catalogs, and include custom images, promotional text, pricing, and seller details.

You can use the following Microsoft Shopping Campaigns attributes from your catalog feed to choose the specific products you want to include in any particular product group.

• Category (up to five for each offer)
• Brand
• Condition
• Item ID (also known as Merchant Product Identifier)
• Product type
• Custom label (up to five for each offer)

You can use multiple Microsoft Shopping Campaigns attributes to narrow your group even further.

Microsoft Sponsored Products

Currently in Beta in the US only, Microsoft Sponsored Products allow two partners to share the cost of advertising as they work to drive product sales through certain channels. In simple terms, the two partners could be manufacturers and retailers, or ad agencies and their clients. All they need to have is a merchandising agreement with one another.

Microsoft Shopping Campaigns provides the impressions, clicks, spend, average cost-per-click, and average conversions for each product group.

Leveraging AI in Advertising, including LinkedIn

Microsoft Audience Network is capitalizing on its AI expertise to analyze audience behavior based on Intent data and app interactions. Helping advertisers to provide a brand-safe environment, AI-driven technology comes with a string of new product enhancements for viewable impressions, image upload and management tool updates to make managing images even easier. It features a powerful data visualization tool – Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph consists of robust data sets for search and web activities, and LinkedIn data.

Currently available in beta version in the US only, the company has expressed its intention to launch Microsoft Audience Network in the UK and Canada very soon in 2019.

We will keep an eye on how Microsoft Advertising cope with Google Advertising and Facebook Advertising.

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