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Credit card ads: Showcase your offerings on Microsoft Advertising

September 28, 2021

If you’re a credit card advertiser, you know there are new ways consumers are shopping and searching for your offerings online: they’re making faster decisions, using fewer comparison sites, and are less brand-oriented. In that case, showcasing your brand offerings to our unique Microsoft audience is more important than ever, so you can put your best foot forward and turn those clicks into conversions.

To help you achieve these goals (and in line with our previous announcements for travel and automotive), Microsoft Advertising is excited to announce the open beta of a new product unique to Microsoft Advertising: Credit card ads! As of this week, Credit card ads are now eligible to serve for advertisers who are targeting United States (US) and Canada (CA) customers.

What are Credit card ads and what do they look like?

Product view of a sample Credit card ad.

Credit card ads trigger for queries such as brand name, card category, credit level, and more. Bank issuers, comparison sites and brands can all take advantage of Credit card ads.

Credit card ads are intent-triggered rich placements that provide your real-time information to consumers and inspire action, all with no keywords required! With this spot on the right rail of the Bing search results page (SERP) running alongside mainline text ads, you can showcase all your various credit card products and promotions such as rewards and cash back percent.

No keywords are required, nor will we crawl your website to generate content. Instead, Credit card ads are dynamically generated based on the data you specify in your feed file, which contains your business data, such as the card issuer, annual fee, and any sign-up bonus. The more details you provide in the feed file, the more information we can include in your ads.

Product view of a sample Credit card ad displayed in the right rail of the search engine results page.

Credit card ads run on the right rail of the Bing SERP and run alongside mainline text ad placements.

Why Credit Card ads?

  • Customized ads — Submit and schedule your feed, and based on the attributes you provide, we’ll create relevant, personalized ads.
  • Improved return on ad spend — See more volume, increased click-through rates (CTR), and lower cost per click (CPC) rates.
  • Save time with automation — With no keywords required, the ads are created by feed files that use Microsoft AI automation and are fully equipped for bulk upload.

What kind of success are advertisers seeing with Credit card ads?

Whether you’re a bank issuer, comparison site or brand, advertisers have achieved great performance with Credit card ads so far. Here’s what we’re seeing:

  • More conversions — One customer in the Credit card ads flight so far has seen a 46% lift in conversion rate.1
  • Lower costs — In early flights of Credit card ads, advertisers so far have seen 70% lower cost per acquisition (CPA).1

We’re excited to offer this great opportunity for cost-effective sales to all of you!

Awesome! How do I get started?

To sign up for the open beta for Credit Card ads, you first need to either reach out to your Microsoft Advertising rep or use this link to enroll.

Once you’re in the beta, you’ll need to provide a feed. A comprehensive feed with rich attributes such as image URLs and contextual keywords is critical for your success with Credit card ads. We’d also recommend feed scheduling to keep your feed data fresh and to ensure your campaigns remain effective.

For more details on the rest of setup, please see the help page Use Credit card ads to showcase your product and promotions.

What else is important to know?

Here are a few other things to keep in mind as you start running your Credit card ads.

The auction is independent from text ads

  • You can participate in both the Credit card 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 credit card ads block simultaneously.
  • The credit cards 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 bid within the range of $2.50-$4.00 as the starting bid. 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 U.S. 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 share this Credit card ads offering up to advertisers! If you’re interested in participating in the beta, reach out to your Microsoft Advertising rep to learn more, or use this link to enroll. And check out the 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.

[1] Microsoft internal data.

Authors

  • Kevin Salat

    PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER, MICROSOFT ADVERTISING

    Kevin Salat
  • Qin Xiao

    PROGRAM MANAGER, MICROSOFT ADVERTISING

    Qin Xiao

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