Showcase your brand and products with a new Multimedia Ads format

Microsoft Advertising has announced a new responsive search ad format, called Multimedia Ads. The ads will combine advertisers’ images, headlines and descriptions using machine learning to showcase your brand and products with a rich ad format. As per announcement “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?

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) or in the mainline at the top of the search results pages. To help your Ad stand out even more and provide exclusivity, there will only be one Ad on a page, for only one advertiser at a time.

Where will Multimedia Ads Display?

Multimedia ads will be showed on the Bing search pages and will be featured prominently in the mainline at the top of the SERP or on the right rail. There will only be one multimedia ad per page, so only one advertiser can deliver a multi-media ad at a time.

Here are a few examples of what they can look like.

Mainline ad examples (4:1 aspect ratio)

Mainline ad with enhanced sitelinks (4:1 aspect ratio)

Right rail ad examples (1.91:1 aspect ratio)

How To Setup Microsoft Advertising Multimedia Ads?

Setup of Microsoft 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 below). For best performance, Microsoft strongly recommend that you upload multiple ad variations of high-quality images in all 4 aspect ratios: 1.91:1, 1:1, 1:2 and 4:1.

What Image Sizes Should I Use?

Microsoft Advertising strongly recommend that advertisers upload multiple creative variations of high-quality images in all 4 aspect ratios: 1.91:1, 1:1, 1:2 and 4:1

Microsoft Multimedia Recommendations & Auto-Apply

Microsoft Advertising will create recommendations using advertisers’ existing image assets (such as image extensions) and text ads assets, as well as stock images (coming soon).

Once the recommendations are added to an account, advertisers will have a 7-day review period to apply or dismiss them, after which they’ll be auto-applied to the account. Advertisers can also opt out of the auto-apply functionality at the account level.

Bid Adjustment Settings

Multimedia Ads offer the richest ad experience on the search results page today and to effectively compete for the user’s attention a 40% bid modifier will be applied as the default setting. The ability to use positive bid adjustment settings will help your Ads get more visibility without affecting your performance of other ad types (currently supported range of 20% to 900%).

Upcoming Enhancements

Microsoft Advertising plans to roll out the following enhancements in the near future:

• Enhanced mainline experiences with new rich formats, including video.
• 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.

With the help of Multimedia Ads, your brand and products can capture attention and drive more sales and more leads for your business. Check out the Multimedia Ads help page for more details.

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A new tool for creative advertising

Google announced the launch of a new tool for creative advertising tools, called “Ads Creative Studio”, which aims to unify multiple creative tools. Ads Creative Studio will incorporate the following tools:

• Director Mix, previously available to a limited group of advertisers, will allow you to customize your creative for different audiences by building out multiple versions of a YouTube video ad with swappable elements.
• Dynamic Display and HTML5 are tools that allow you to generate customized and interactive creatives for Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360.
• Audio Mixer and the recently announced dynamic audio offering allow you to build tailored audio ads for Display & Video 360 quickly and efficiently at scale.

What Does This Change Mean?

The goal of this change is to make it easier to build out multiple content pieces. The Ads Creative Studio will have separate libraries for assets, think of these as the building blocks for ads, and the project library, where the creators collaborate on ad creation.

Thanks to the asset library, it’s intended to streamline asset management. It can allow for one team to manage the raw assets, while another uses them to create advertisements.

Likewise, one team could use the raw assets to make display ads while another uses them to make YouTube ads, and keeping everything in one place would make it easier to ensure that everyone is pulling from the same approved set of assets. Ads will also be available to be used across projects, once created.

Designed to Increase Collaboration

The Ads Creative Studio is designed to improve collaboration between creative and media teams. Teams can work together to collaborate on templates, implement design rules, and implement QA processes all through the new tool.

How Are Ads Deployed?

Once ads are created, they are able to be exported to Google Ads, Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 for use.

The Future of Create with Google

In addition to the new tool, Google has announced that Create with Google has merged with Think with Google. Now all insights for creators and media teams will be hosted in the same place.

As per Google statement “We’re introducing Ads Creative Studio, a unified home for Google’s creative advertising tools, to help you build compelling experiences for video, display and audio ads. Ads Creative Studio will allow creative teams to build and innovate together while increasing productivity and simplifying the overall process to bring a great ad to life.”

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Increase Conversions By Using Responsive Search Ads

Today, Google officially announced that Responsive Search Ads (RSA) will become the default ad type for Search campaigns in Google Ads, but the expanded text ads can also be created. Google said that due to COVID-19, search queries like “takeout restaurants” have grown over 5000%, and meanwhile searches for “online learning” have grown over 400%2 in the last year.

What Are Responsive Search Ads?

Responsive Search Ads are Google’s newest, largest, and most flexible search ad format. Unlike traditional search ads, where you write your headlines and descriptions together to create 1 static ad text, when writing a Responsive Search Ad you can write up to 15 different headlines and up to 4 different descriptions. Collectively, those headlines and descriptions can be arranged in 43,680 different permutations, which means the ad testing possibilities are nearly endless!

RSAs allow advertisers to input multiple headlines and ad copy variations, and Google Ads uses machine learning to determine which variations to use based on what queries people are searching for. The variations are tested to determine which combinations perform best. The Ad strength score lets search marketers understand how to improve their RSAs for better performance.

Google recommends that advertisers not using RSAs currently consider the following best practices:

• Use Ad strength when writing your headlines and descriptions to understand the effectiveness of your ads.
  Take advantage of location insertion and countdown customizers to show ads that are relevant and meaningful to your customers.
• Use Smart Bidding and broad match keywords with responsive search ads to help optimize the performance of your ads while maximizing your reach.
• Review cross-campaign asset reporting to understand which creative assets resonate most with your customers.

How Responsive Search Ads Works?

The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more opportunities Google has to serve ads that more closely match your potential customers’ search queries, which can improve your ad performance. After you enter headlines and descriptions, the RSAs assembles the text into multiple ad combinations in a way that avoids redundancy, different from expanded text ads.

Next, in any given ad, a maximum of 3 headlines and 2 descriptions will be selected to show in different combinations and orders. Over time, Google Ads will test the most promising ad combinations, and learn which combinations are the most relevant for different queries.

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