New Ad Creator automatically suggests images

Visuals are one of the most critical components for your ads to earn engagement. It’s with this in mind that we’ve updated many of our advertising products with new options to enrich visual storytelling for advertisers, our most recent being Ad Creator.

With Microsoft Advertising, we see that visuals lead to more engagement, with 7% higher click-through rates (CTRs) on our ads—meaning better performance for your ​brand.¹

Sourcing and editing photos for various channels wasn’t always easy; however, with automated website image suggestions, Ad Creator* provides a collection of relevant images from your website for you to repurpose with ease.

This new feature offers a media library and a collection of simple image editing tools. They allow you to stand out from your competitors and represent your offerings in a new and unique way. Not only that, with the Ad Creator smart effects feature, you can easily modify the look and feel of your ads to stand out in advertising and engage more people.

Why use Microsoft Advertising Ad Creator?

Great images can help your customers instantly understand a message with little effort. Because of the impact and value that imagery adds, using them wherever possible isn’t an option, it’s imperative. According to research firm Kantar, content with imagery results in 50% more recall.² When audiences can recall your message with ease, your brand awareness grows in addition to the increased engagement opportunities.

Using Ad Creator saves you time by extracting images from your site so you can browse and use them directly in Microsoft Advertising. It’s simple to use; just click the Add Image button to see the images from your website.

Once you’ve determined an appropriate image, select add images > website images and choose which ones you’d like to show with your ads.

Enhance images for better engagement

Once your visuals are selected and the quality is high enough, you can enhance them with smart effects. Ad Creator smart effects is an easy-to-use photo editor that you can access by selecting the pencil icon below your image in the thumbnail list.

When creating Multimedia Ads, Ad Creator lets you apply smart effects and slightly edits the photos for best results for your particular ad. This way, they’ll be differentiated from your website but still have the overall look and feel for branding purposes.

With Ad Creator smart effects, you can create subtle but impactful photo alterations and choose from designer effects like background blur and color, filters, and cropping. What’s more, Ad Creator will offer image recommendations and help you choose the optimal cropping area for each ad type with smart cropping.

When editing, you can try different designer effects and check which ad variation looks better for a given image. Then, choose the color picker to modify to your liking and test cropping by manually adjusting the viewable area. You can preview the ads in different aspect ratios without ever leaving the Microsoft Advertising platform.

• Designer effects provide a selection of photo editing filters.
• Background blur alters the image background based on how you want the objects in the foreground to pop and focuses more on certain elements of an image.
• Background color allows you to select and apply a solid hue from the auto-generated options, or you can use the color picker for manual selection.

With Ad Creator smart effects, you can modify the look and feel of your ads in one place without additional help from a design team. The changes you make to images can help your business stand out and represent your offerings in new and unique ways.

These updates and more are just a few of the ways that we’re enhancing our offering to make Microsoft Advertising a one-stop tool for all your digital advertising.

You might also want to read our blog on how to amplify visual storytelling featuring other ad types to make it easier.

*Ad Creator is currently in pilot. Contact our support team or your account representative to get started.