As the pandemic required people and businesses to adapt to a new way of life, digital took the spotlight. People searched, purchased, and shared — all online. In fact, global digital media consumption increased by 112%.
As people adapted to working and learning from home, more than 4 trillion minutes were spent on Windows 10 devices a month, a 75% increase year over year.
Consumers have also become accustomed to a new way of interacting with businesses. For example, 73% of U.S. consumers tried new shopping behaviors and most plan to make them permanent.
To meet today’s digital expectations, advertisers will need to be well prepared to reach consumers through enriching and relevant experiences. That’s why at Microsoft Advertising we’re creating opportunities for businesses to reach a valuable audience where productivity happens at the intersection of work and life. With the power of Microsoft’s ecosystem of websites and services, including over 1 billion Microsoft Windows 10 devices,
512 million searchers through Microsoft Bing,
and more than 600 million devices with the Microsoft Edge browser installed,
Microsoft Advertising can help you grow your business through the shifts in consumer behavior.
We offer immersive experiences that grab consumers’ attention, intelligence that enables advertisers to work smarter, and a focus on privacy that bridges consumer expectations and advertiser needs. Today, we’re announcing new solutions that enable business growth at Microsoft Advertising Elevate, our premier partner event.
Create rich experiences across the decision journey
As digital becomes more pervasive, Microsoft Advertising is creating rich ad experiences that grab people’s attention and help brands stand out as consumers go across their decision journey.
- NEW! Multimedia ads
put a spotlight on the brand message, offering exclusive space to appear on the mainline and right rail. These ads are created from images provided through Image Extensions, or intelligently suggested from stock images.
- NEW! Video extensions
help advertisers stand out on the search results page, engaging consumers in a format that is more widely used than ever.
Experiences have also been optimized across various verticals:
- Coupons
and Price comparisons
on the Microsoft Edge browser give brands an edge when consumers are shopping for comparable products, creating a reason to purchase quickly.
- Product Ad experiences are eye-catching and cater to how some consumers shop. Now these experiences show up in more places to drive engagement.
- NEW! Automotive ads
showcase vehicle inventory in real time. These ads are easy to set up, and the latest price is always reflected based on the feed you’ve uploaded.
- NEW! Tours and Activities ads,
which are unique to Microsoft Advertising, inspire people to dream and book trips with photos, reviews, and more. Like Automotive ads, these ads are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and don’t require keywords.
- NEW! Property Promotion ads
help influence those who are planning a trip with highly visual ads that appear in the top two slots on the hotel grid in Microsoft Bing Maps. Advertisers are in complete control of this premium, curated experience.
In addition, as consumers make decisions across their shopping journeys, it’s important to consider the power of search and native running in tandem. People exposed to both search and native ads on the Microsoft Audience Network
are 2.6 times more likely to visit a brand’s site and 3.5 times more likely to convert
compared to those who are only exposed to paid search ads. We are improving the Microsoft Audience Network by expanding it to include features focused on engaging consumers while ensuring your ads show up in brand-safe environments.
- NEW! Video ads
help captivate people, as consumers are expected to watch videos online for more than two hours per day this year.
Reach an engaged audience of 300M daily users
with these 6-to-120-second videos.
- A stock image library
provides advertisers access to more than 300 million free images from Shutterstock.
- NEW! Facebook Import
helps you reach an expanded audience at the click of a button. Import up to 10,000 campaigns for each account and customize easily to meet campaign needs.
Productivity and effectiveness powered by intelligence
People are working longer hours than they did before the pandemic, leading to a 2.5-hour increase in the average working day across many countries globally.
How often is creative or strategic work put aside while teams spend countless hours manually getting things done? Microsoft Advertising is creating tools that make work easier, so advertisers can focus on growing their businesses.
- NEW! Seasonal In-market Audiences
help advertisers reach an audience that is ready to convert based on seasonal events like Mother’s Day, Back to School, Black Friday, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day.
- NEW! Static headlines in Dynamic Search Ads (DSA),
which are unique to Microsoft Advertising, enable advertisers to gain full control over ad titles while still harnessing the discovery power of DSA to identify new queries.
- Intelligent auto-bidding options enable you to optimize your campaigns through automated bidding strategies. From Enhanced Manual Bidding,
to Target Impression Share,
to Portfolio bid strategies (availability coming soon), these new options optimize bids through intelligent signals and help advertisers better achieve performance goals.
- Google Import smart workflow (available in all markets) enables advertisers to save time by importing all their audience campaigns from Google Ads while still ensuring full control of the campaigns.
Product experiences that empower small and medium businesses (SMBs)
Throughout the last year, small businesses — the cornerstones of many communities — have been impacted. As many SMBs recover and continue to grow their digital connections with consumers, Microsoft Advertising has created experiences that make it easy for them.
- NEW! Smart Pages for small business
are automation from the get-go. Smart Pages will help you automatically set up a business website with ease: The magic happens in the background based on campaign information or your business’s Facebook page.
- Coming soon! A one-stop shop for small businesses. We are creating a single destination designed to make growing a business online easy. Across paid search and social advertising, and organic social media, this feature will help with account management and campaign and ad creation with specific suggestions tuned to unique business needs. In addition, ad creative, keywords, and ad targeting can be optimized to drive success across channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Expanding into 29 new markets in Europe and Africa
We will be growing our global footprint to include 29 new markets by the end of August. This will help marketers reach an additional 41 million new people on the Microsoft Search Network who make 400 million monthly searches. And our planned investments will create further opportunities to increase reach in markets with a potential 200 million internet users.
Introducing Private Search for Microsoft Bing application programming interface (API)
Hosted on Azure, Private Search for Microsoft Bing API empowers publishers to give consumers more options for privacy-first experiences. This service enables fraud protection for our advertisers while respecting consumer privacy. It never receives the search term used, and it doesn’t share any personal data with other Microsoft services — including Microsoft Bing.
As our first partner, DuckDuckGo now uses Private Search for Microsoft Bing API as a foundation for their private search service. It allows them to strengthen their value proposition to advertisers while maintaining the privacy of users, helping advertisers reach an audience which cannot be found on Google search.
In addition, partners like Swisscows.com have already adopted the solution, and other privacy-focused partners are evaluating it as part of their roadmaps.
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