Microsoft Advertising

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Microsoft Advertising

by Mel Jan 8, 2023 | 0 Votes | 59 Tested | 0 Reviews Your vote

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User Conversion , SEO , Advertising

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Microsoft Advertising is a service that provides paying clients pay per click (PPC) advertising on both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines as well as the Microsoft Search Network (MSN). Visit Website Similar Tools Tested Post a Review

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Summary Features User Experience Pricing Conclusion

Summary

Microsoft Advertising is a service that provides paying clients pay per click (PPC) advertising on both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines as well as the Microsoft Search Network (MSN).

Features

Formerly known as Bing Ads, Microsoft adCenter, and MSN adCenter, Microsoft Advertising is similar to, and competes with, Google Ads in using both the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay per click (PPC) on their ad and the advertisement's click-through rate (CTR) to determine how frequently an advertisement is shown. This system encourages advertisers to write effective ads and to advertise only on searches which are relevant to their advertisement.

Whereas Google Ads takes advantage of their native Google search engine to monetize searches and clicks; Microsoft Advertising uses The Microsoft Search Network consisting of search platforms Bing and partner sites like Yahoo!. By using Microsoft Advertising, businesses can reach a large and unique audience made up of millions of people who search Bing every day, providing a valuable source of potential customers.

Customers you’ve yet to reach are more likely searching for general terms that wouldn’t necessarily bring up your business in search results. Advertising next to relevant Bing search results puts your business front and center with interested customers you otherwise might not reach.

But with Google being the far dominant search market, why then should a business consider mining opportunities from MSN? For starters, in the U.S., the Microsoft Search Network has 124 million unique searchers with Bing powering 36.7% of U.S. desktop searches and generating 11.7 billion monthly searches around the globe— an aggregate of 45.4 million searchers that Google can't reach. In fact, 27% of Microsoft Advertising clicks come from searches that are exclusive to the Microsoft Search Network.

So, if you’re a marketer in the United States, you may be omitting 1/3 of your audience by not using Bing. What’s more, it’s been shown that more older users (above 34 years old) are on Bing, with a vast majority making $40,000 or more each year—and more than one-third making more than $100,000 a year! No doubt, Bing is an ideal platform if your product targets this market.

Appearing on the top or to the right of Bing, Yahoo and MSN search results, Microsoft Ads allows advertisers to target their ads by restricting them to a given set of demographics and by increasing their bids whenever the ad is seen by a user of a certain demographic. As of November 2006, no other PPC advertising system has a similar feature. You can also choose to target your ads to different geographic regions as well as specific times of day or days of the week.

User Experience

Microsoft Advertising’s Tools help manage your campaigns and meet your advertising goal whether you are working with a fixed budget or trying to hit a cost per acquisition or action.

With the Microsoft Advertising Application, you can easily import campaigns from Google Ads to Microsoft Advertising; create ads; advertise globally or locally to any country or region, or within a specific distance from your business; measure campaign performance with reporting; evaluate ad and keyword performance; track online advertising budget and spend; develop insights for optimizing campaigns; create automated action and review extensions; create a catalog for your products with Microsoft Merchant Center, use Microsoft’s Competition to gain detailed insight into your top search competitors; play around with Experiments to test performance between two campaign variants; take advantage of LinkedIn Profile targeting (for B2B audience targeting); and many more.

Meanwhile, similar to Google Ads Editor, Microsoft provides a Microsoft Advertising Editor desktop tool to manage campaigns offline for later syncing online. Features include: Offline management, easily importing campaigns from Google Ads to Microsoft Advertising, managing multiple accounts simultaneously, making multiple changes quickly with bulk editing tools, copy-pasting keywords, ads, and even whole campaigns from one account to another; and making changes before uploading to your account.

Microsoft Advertising also provides a Bing Ads API (very similar in features and functionality to the Microsoft Ads Application) that can also be used to manage advertising campaigns.

On the whole, Microsoft Advertising ads will look and operate the exact same way they do on Google Adwords, give or take a few minor stylistic differences. But more importantly, it is potentially cheaper and more profitable to run ads on Bing and the MSN because Microsoft ads generally require a budget less than half the cost of running ads on Google Adwords. And while a lower budget translates to fewer clicks, on the upside, this also means having a lower overall cost-per-click. What’s more, the click-through rate of a Microsoft ad is generally higher than its Google counterpart.

That means by using the same amount of money on Microsoft Advertising instead of Adwords, you could essentially double your overall ad budget. This observation should especially be attractive to businesses that are faced with enormously high cost-per-click keywords on their Adwords account, such as tech, real estate, insurance, legal services, and consumer services.

Pricing

With Microsoft Advertising, sign up is FREE, with no minimums, allowing you to start advertising with any budget and pay only when customers click your ad. No click, no charge.

There are two main ways to pay for those charges: Prepay where you can add funds to your account and have charges deducted from those funds, and Postpay where you pay on a regular basis after charges accrue either when you reach your billing threshold amount or on your monthly billing date (whichever comes first); or through a monthly invoicing process.

To save even more on your ad spend, Microsoft Advertising occasionally runs promotional offers, or coupons. Typically geared for new customers, promotional offers require you to spend money on your advertising campaigns first, and then Microsoft gives you a credit toward advertising at no additional cost to you. Although you can't request a promotional offer, you can find them through Microsoft Advertising promotional events, online marketing drives, or other special offers.

Conclusion

While Google Adwords continues to retain a vast majority of internet search activity, it doesn’t negate the fact that Microsoft Advertising can take full advantage of Bing and MSN’s over 45 million users that Google doesn’t even reach. Plus, with a lower cost-per-click and a higher click-through rate, advertising on Microsoft means you can potentially double your amount of ad budget spend than you could on Adwords. Depending on your individual needs, it could be worth it for your business to seriously look into supplementing your ad buys with Microsoft Advertising—or even making a full switch!