Helping better connect consumers to professionals

Any organization that’s providing an individual service to its customers—whether it’s for insurance, financial advising, or real estate—knows that at the end of the day, what makes them great is their people. The consultants, advisors, or agents who connect with consumers for their service are the lifeblood of the organization and drive business success. To help champion these professionals and better connect them to consumers with engaging ad experiences, Microsoft Advertising is developing a new ad solution called Professional Service Ads to make these connections more effective than ever.

As we’ve suggested in similar announcements aiming to serve credit card and health insurance advertisers, this increasingly complex online landscape demands solutions that get consumers through the marketing funnel more quickly to help them make their decisions faster. Professional Service Ads aim to do just that for anyone that’s looking to get connected with a certain agent, advisor, consultant, or any sort of professional. We’re excited to begin this journey and provide this solution for advertisers across a myriad of industries, starting with our current pilot now available in the US and Canada.

What are Professional Service Ads and what do they look like?

Examples of Professional Service Ads for insurance services, real estate, and tax services (coming soon). More Professional Service Ad types are planned for the future.

Similar to our recently released Credit Card Ads and Health Insurance Ads, Professional Service Ads are intent-triggered rich placements that provide real-time information to consumers about your agents, advisors, and consultants, all with no keywords required. With a spot on the right rail of the Bing search engine results page (SERP) running alongside mainline text ads, you can showcase your professionals more prominently than ever.

If you want to think bigger than just promoting your individual local agents, though, you can also leverage Professional Service Ads to promote your regional office or branch or even your national company. All these offerings are available to both service providers as well as comparison sites.

Professional Service Ads are dynamically generated based on the data you specify in your feed file, such as your plan type, the organization category, federal registration status, and URLs. The more details you provide in the feed file, the more information we can include in your ads.

What kind of success are advertisers seeing with Professional Service Ads so far?

In the early stages of this pilot, advertisers have seen great performance so far.

More conversions and acquisitions: For advertisers using Professional Service Ads, conversion rates have increased by about 60% compared to regular text ads.

Significantly lower costs: On average, advertisers have seen cost per acquisition (CPA) decrease by 67% compared to overall performance in their campaigns.

Performance is expected to vary depending on which type of service you’re advertising, but across the board, Professional Service Ads are delivering a spectacular cost-effective performance so far.

What else is coming up for Professional Service Ads?

As many companies advertising on Bing rely on the people power of their professionals, there are numerous ways we’re looking to expand this ad type. In the near term, we’re expanding to tax services and new markets. However, we expect to see more professional services, both in and outside of the financial service industry, coming to Microsoft Advertising in the future.

What else should I know?

Here are a few other things to keep in mind as you start running your Professional Service Ads:

The auction is independent from text ads

• You can participate in the Professional Service Ads auction with the campaign associated to your feed file and also participate in the text ad auction with your regular campaigns.
• This means that you can serve in both the text ad block and the Professional Service Ad block simultaneously.
• The Professional Service Ads auction is CPC-based.

Bids and budgets

• We recommend that you start with $100–$500 per day to ensure consistent results for learning and optimization.
• Set your starting bid within the range of $3–$5. Monitor performance and average position and adjust up or down accordingly.

Targeting

• Set location targeting in campaign settings as “United States” or “Canada.” This will ensure ads are eligible to serve to all users searching from within the US or CA.
• We recommend that you measure and monitor baseline performance first and then fine-tune the return on investment based on audiences.

We’re excited to offer this ad type to advertisers! For more information on Professional Service Ads, you can see our help page. If you’re interested in participating in the beta, reach out to your Microsoft Advertising representative to learn more or contact our support team to be enabled.

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. You can also email us at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com or contact Support.