About Microsoft Audience Ads

Learn about Microsoft Audience Ads, a way to place custom-designed ads in high-quality web properties.

Important

This feature is currently available in AU, DE, FR, NZ, US, UK, and CA.

Search ads are now automatically eligible to be transformed into Microsoft Audience Ads.

What are Microsoft Audience Ads?

Microsoft Audience Ads is a native advertising solution optimized for search advertisers. This feature enables advertisers to get additional high-quality traffic from non-search placements. Microsoft Audience Ads experiences, such as ads placed within articles, are engaging for users, integrate naturally into page content, and deliver visually rich ads for advertisers. Microsoft Audience Ads campaigns are easy to set up, maintain, and optimize because they are fully integrated with existing Microsoft Advertising workflows.

Where will my ads appear?

Microsoft Audience Ads appear on the Microsoft Audience Network. These ad placements are cross-device and include premium sites like MSN, Outlook.com, Microsoft Edge, and other partners (with more to come). Clicks on these ads will take users to the landing page you specified when you created your ads.

To take advantage of these placements, your ad will need to have an image. Adding images to your ads can help boost your volume and drive clicks. See below for instructions on how to add images to your campaign.

Who will see my ads?

Microsoft Audience Ads are unique because they’re targeted to users based on our understanding of their interests. We use consumer intent signals, which include search history, browse history, page content, and demographic information. These signals, combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, provide highly relevant content to users and determine which ads to display. Microsoft Audience Ads also conform to your search ads' existing targeting and negative-keyword settings.

Create a new ad with audience ad format preferred

From the collapsible menu on the left, select All campaigns > Ads & extensions > Ads.
Select Create an ad and choose an ad group.
Select Expanded text ad as the Ad type.
As you set the ad's title, text, and URLs, keep in mind that this will be an audience ad, not a search ad. Audience ads work best with informative text rather than calls to action.
Select the Prefer audience ad format checkbox.
Select Save.

Adjust bids to set your level of participation in Microsoft Audience Ads

From the collapsible menu on the left, select All campaigns.
From the page menu, select Campaigns or Ad groups.
Select one or more campaign or dynamic ad group, and then select Edit > Change budgets.
Use the drop down menu to choose Set, Increase, or Decrease.
Adjust the bid:
1. Select Set to choose a specific daily budget.
2. Select Increase if you want to invest more heavily in Microsoft Audience Ads for this campaign or ad group. You can adjust the bid up to 900% for maximum participation.
3. Select Decrease if you want to invest less. To opt out of Microsoft Audience Ads completely, decrease your bid by 100%.

Add Image Extensions

Images play a key role in getting people's attention and driving clicks. You can define the imagery to use in your ads by associating Image Extensions to your campaign or ad group. This is important: If you don't have Image Extensions, our system may automatically use stock images to increase the number of placements for your Microsoft Audience Ad. Stock images are licensed images that are editorially reviewed for quality and relevance and then matched with appropriate ads (to opt out of using stock images, use bid modifiers set to -100% at the campaign or ad group level).

Learn more at Image extensions: Add images to your ad.

Set up Universal Event Tracking

You can improve Microsoft Advertising's understanding of users' interests by having Universal Event Tracking (UET) tags on your website and setting up remarketing lists. This will allow us to target your ads to people who have previously visited or interacted with your website. For more information on UET tags and remarketing lists, see Remarketing: Target people who have visited your site before