Blog post
Let your brand shine with Multimedia Ads
Updated September 15, 2022 to clarify available product details
The value of search advertising has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception in the early 2000s, and so has the competition for customers’ attention. How can your brand stand out in this crowded field and communicate your value? How do you amplify product discovery, inspire action, and build loyalty?
The answer to all these questions is Multimedia Ads. Multimedia Ads are a new responsive ad format we’re now offering on Microsoft Bing.com search pages, allowing you to showcase your brand and products with a rich ad format. As part of our global rollout, customers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam markets will start seeing this new ad type today, and all other customers will have this new feature in the next few weeks.
What are Multimedia Ads and what do they look like?
Multimedia Ads are designed to combine your own assets like images, headlines, and descriptions with the power of machine-learning technology, to deliver the best attention grabbing large visual ads. These ads will be prominently featured on the right rail (right side of the search results page). To help your Multimedia Ad stand out even more and provide exclusivity, there will only be one Multimedia Ad on a page, for only one advertiser at a time.
Right rail ad examples (1.91:1 aspect ratio)
How do I get started?
The setup of Multimedia Ads should look very familiar, since it closely resembles Responsive Search Ads, but now we’re adding the ability to use rich visual assets in combination with text assets (see example). For best performance, we strongly recommend that you upload multiple ad variations of high-quality images in all four aspect ratios: 1.91:1, 1:1, 1:2 and 4:1.
Multimedia Ads can be accessed in the Ad type dropdown on the Create an ad page.
Get additional details on how to set up Multimedia Ads.
Jump start your Multimedia Ads experience with our automated recommendations
We recognize that building visually rich ads takes time and effort, so we’re offering you the ability to launch this compelling new ad format quickly and easily with our automated recommendations. Using our AI technologies, we create these recommendations using your existing image assets (such as image extensions) and text ads assets, as well as stock images (coming soon). Once we post these recommendations in your account, you’ll have a 7-day review period to apply or dismiss them, after which they’ll be auto-applied to your account. You can also opt out of the auto-apply functionality at the account level.
What else is important to know?
Testing a new ad type is always exciting but understanding what to bid can be challenging. Multimedia Ads offer the richest ad experience on the search results page today, and a 40% bid modifier will be applied as the default setting to effectively compete for the user’s attention. The ability to use positive bid adjustment settings will help your Multimedia Ads get more visibility without affecting your performance of other ad types (currently supported range of 20% to 900%).
The road ahead
- Multimedia Ads for Retail: Combining the power of Multimedia Ads with your product feeds.
- Additional Bing surfaces and expansion to the Microsoft Audience Network.
- New CPM-based auto bidding strategies for Multimedia Ads.
- Additional import opportunities of your rich media assets from other ad platforms.
We can’t wait for you to try Multimedia Ads, so your brand and products can catch attention and drive more sales and more leads for your business. Check out the Multimedia Ads help page for more details.
Help us improve Microsoft Advertising
Your comments and feedback are integral to our ongoing efforts to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.
