Blog post
Microsoft Advertising partners with Snap to power Sponsored Links within Snapchat’s My AI chatbot
It’s been an exciting few months for Microsoft Advertising at the forefront of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovations which are transforming advertising. You can see how our vision to reimagine advertising with these new capabilities has been transpiring from the many AI developments launching across Bing, to the recent release of AI-generated asset recommendations for Responsive Search Ads (RSA), to the transformative innovations shared last week around Co-pilot and Conversational Ads. We’re focused on continuing to leverage this innovative technology to unlock new value for consumers, advertisers, and partners.
Following our industry first Chat Ads API announcement in May, we’re excited to announce a groundbreaking partnership with Snap. Snap is now tapping the unique capabilities of Microsoft’s Chat Ads API to serve highly relevant Sponsored Links in their popular and highly engaging My AI chatbot within Snapchat.
Sponsored Links within Snapchat’s “My AI”
Microsoft Advertising provided Sponsored Links in Snapchat’s My AI allows brands to:
- Engage with a highly active audience
Snapchat reaches over 750 million people every month, on average, and Snapchatters send billions of messages, known as Snaps, to close friends and family every day. My AI is also now amongst the largest consumer chatbots available today as over 150 million people have sent over 10 billion messages within it.1 - Naturally integrate Sponsored Links into the user experience
Deep conversational engagement leads to richer understanding of user context and a seamless, relevant content experience for users, while providing a strong return on investment (ROI) for advertisers. - Keep up with new customer behavior
Generative AI chat is the fastest growing technology today, with high engagement and appeal. This is a great way to keep pace and get exposure on this emerging new medium. Today Snapchat reaches over 75% of 13- to 34-year-olds2 in over 20 countries, and the My AI chatbot is a key new offering within the app.
How to leverage this opportunity
Microsoft Advertising’s mobile momentum has never been better; especially with the growing usage of the new AI-powered Bing and the improvements across the network to make the mobile experience richer. We’re seeing this momentum lead to performance growth and continuing to expand on this quality mobile volume has been a top area of feedback we’ve heard from advertisers. Given Snapchat is a popular mobile application, with over 750 million monthly active users globally, this partnership is enabling us to further deliver on this request by extending our reach to their mobile-first audience.
- As an advertiser: Tapping into this opportunity is easy. Advertisers just need to maximize the mobile coverage within their Microsoft Advertising campaigns.
In your Device targeting settings, check to make sure you’re prioritizing mobile traffic by having positive mobile bid modifiers across all your ad groups.
- As a Snapchatter: Snapchatters can access these chat conversational capabilities via My AI. This can be found on the Chat tab by navigating right from the home Camera tab.
How this impacts performance for your campaigns
The Snap traffic is reported in aggregate in the “Microsoft sites and select traffic” category in the publisher report in the Microsoft Advertising platform. This traffic has Microsoft properties as the benchmark. Advertisers can check their mobile traffic reporting for incremental volume.
During the testing of this new experience, the initial impact on our mobile traffic has been promising. This has led us to roll out the experience more broadly in the US and ramp up across 13 other markets, with more to come.3 Our advertisers are experiencing increased mobile traffic year over year across the Microsoft network and are seeing, on average, over 15% more mobile impressions from Microsoft site and select traffic while maintaining or improving cost per acquisition (CPA).4 This partnership is quickly proving to provide an excellent return for those who engage, while also giving our advertisers more brand exposure across mobile devices.
What’s ahead
We continue to listen to feedback from our advertisers and partners as we evolve our chat offerings to influence the next waves of innovation in generative AI. If you’re interested in partnering, reach out to discuss your chat experience needs. We’re here to help whether you need both algorithmic organic results and ads monetization or ads monetization only.
Help us improve Microsoft Advertising
Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. You can use the Microsoft Advertising Feedback portal, in-product feedback, Twitter, or Instagram, and as always, contact Support.
[1] Snap Inc. internal data as of June 11, 2023.
[2] Sponsored Links will not serve to users under the age of 18
[3] Markets currently available are Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Great Britian, India, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and the United States. Ads will only serve to users over the age of 18.
[4] Microsoft internal data, worldwide Microsoft Sites and Select mobile: June 2023 compared to June 2022.
