Microsoft Multimedia Ads

Microsoft’s multimedia ads are like an upgraded responsive search ad. This new ad format is unique in a few different ways. With the addition of an image to the responsive search ad, it allows a rich format that really encourages engagement with your brand on the Bing result pages.

Also, only one multimedia ad can be visible at a time. So your brand has an opportunity to really stand out over the competition. In this video, we will cover almost everything that you need to know about multimedia ads. But before we dive in, I want to give you one warning, this feature is not available in every single account. We want to give you that warning so at least when you’re prepping to prepare it, you know exactly where to begin.

Multimedia ads are ads, so it’s no surprise that we need to go into the ad section in Microsoft ads, to start building this new format. There’s a lot of ads I tossed at you, but I hope you get it.

So I’m just going to pick one campaign, then I’m going to choose one ad group, and then I can click on ads and extensions. I know you’re saying pause keywords or relevant keywords, this is not an actual client account, I’m just using it for the sake of this demo. But to create a new ad, we need to click on the, you guessed it, create ad button.

When creating your new ad within Microsoft ads, you need to choose the ad type. The default option will be responsive search ads. But if we go over to the arrow in the menu and click on it, there we see options to create expanded text ads, app install ads, and then the one that we want, multimedia ads.

As I said in the intro, multimedia ads are like taking responsive search ads to the next level. We can already see in the preview what an image can do to the text ad experience. So for the rest of this demo, I’m going to go through the multimedia ad creation process, assuming that we want to run an ad for paid media pros, and as we start making changes to this ad, you’ll be able to see how those changes affect what your ad could potentially look like.

The first step it’s an easy one, put in your final URL. If you’re worried about parameters, this section will use auto-tagging if you do have that enabled at the account level, but there are also tracking templates that you can use, and you’ll find that in the advanced section at the very bottom when creating this ad, so we’ll get to it before we save it.

After you have your final URL, let’s go over to images, that is pretty much the standout feature of a multimedia ad. So I’m going to add a few images, and then we’re going to talk about each one.

Okay, I added four images and I did four specifically, because if we scroll down, we see that there are four different previews, and I went through all of them pretty quick. Now, the four images I added were for each of these aspect ratios. You need to choose at least one image with the 1.91 by 1 aspect ratio, and one image with the one-to-one aspect ratio.

This will help Microsoft be able to make these ads more responsive to fit certain placements. If I go back up, now we can see in the preview where the image fits, where our headline is going to be, there’s our display URL, there’s our add text or add descriptions however you want to call them, and then we see an option for a call-to-action button. When we start filling in all of the copy on the left here, we’ll start seeing the preview update.

If I go over to Re-crop, I can click and drag where I would want this to appear. Now, I understand this isn’t the best image to use for this, and my head’s getting cut off and we know from the preview that’s where the text in the call-to-action button will be, and that’s fine.

If you have an image that’s a little bit larger than the aspect ratio like we see here, you can either try to adjust it and I just moved it up and down. You can also click on a corner and shrink it within the same ratio. But if you can’t make the image look good, it’s just the proof that you need to go and create one that’s going to better fit the specific ratio. So I’ll save this one.

If I go and click on a different ratio, it says do I want to include this one? Yes, I do. So if I’m looking at this particular aspect ratio, this one looks pretty good, I don’t have to re-crop it. If I want to go down, do I want to include this aspect ratio? Yes, I do, and then for this one, I want to choose the actual square image.

So I can look at re-cropping it, that is exactly the square, you see it fits exactly how we saved it, so I’m going to leave that one as is. Then going to the one to two ratio, I want to include this one as well, choose this specific image for it, and there we see one I try to do it with a taller image, but we clearly see it’s cutting off the words.

So this is a bad image to use, I can either exclude the specific ratio or create a new one. For the sake of this demo, I’m just going to leave them all in. Let me go back to a more common ratio, so we can see in the preview.

So I know I uploaded four different images, and I did that to show you what each actual size would look like in the proper ratio. I’m going to scroll back up a little bit, just so we can start adding the text portions to these ads. You can see in the short headline you get up to 30 characters, and you can have up to 15 headlines.

Next, you get up to 90 characters for a long headline, you can add up to five long headlines. Next, is your ad text or descriptions, also 90 characters, in this we get up to four descriptions, and there we see a business name. So within these four fields, I’m going to add in a variety of each, and I’m going to jump ahead a little bit, so you don’t have to watch me do it.

Okay, I added a few headlines, just one long description, a couple of ad texts, some of these I just added myself, I just took little wordings from our website. But if you’re running out of ideas, whether it’s a headline or ad text, you can click on the add link under each category, and if you click within the field, there will be some recommended headlines.

Now we can clearly see not all of these are accurate, we don’t do PC videos, and we don’t want to tell people that they can get paid for watching ads, but I understand what Microsoft is trying to do, and a few that were added within each category were from recommendations. So some of them are going to be useful. If I trash that one, I’m going to skip the long headline, go down to add text, same thing with the descriptions.

The top one that we used was copy we pulled from our website, the second ad text option calling out find out more, that was one of the recommended ad texts. There we have our business name, which is a mandatory field. Then you can look at a mobile URL if you want to send users to a different experience, depending on what device they’re on you can do that, I’m going to leave it as is, and then we see the call-to-action options. Because if I scroll back up, this grey button right here is telling me please select your language first, so I’m going to leave it as English. Then we have the option to choose action text.

This may seem a little bit familiar if you are using the action extensions already, and we do have another video talking about action extensions you can watch that one here. But if we click on it, we have a variety of different options to choose from. This is a ton, I go a little bit more in-depth about these in that previous video, but since we are a video one, I’m going to select watch now.

So then if we go back up to the, preview this is what one option of a multimedia ad could look like if we chose to run it, understand this paid media pros is just one headline, this text calling out the two new videos being released that’s just one ad text. The more variance you add, the more options that will run within this particular ad group.

If I chose a different ratio, and want to look at that from that specific preview, it doesn’t look too bad, but it also doesn’t look the greatest. It’s a pretty grayish tone to this image, and with the white text over it, it kind of gets lost a little bit. But if this is the one I want to run with, I can either save if I only want to use the one ad format, or what I’m going to do is do save and create another.

Alright, so I jumped ahead again, I have a few different ad variants here, some have the image cropped differently, some are using different headlines and ad text. Just like with responsive ads, even though we get multiple fields, there is still opportunity to test.

Maybe you have different multimedia ads based on different images that you’re testing, perfect. If you found images that work, maybe you’re testing different multimedia ads based upon different themes of the text portions, grouping specific types of headlines, or add text together.

Now I know I just filled in certain things just to get the ad saved, I get it this is a demo, but we do recommend trying to make your headlines as unique as possible. Try not to be too repetitive within your headlines and ad text, try to think of all the different combinations that could appear and would certain headlines match with certain descriptions or ad text, vice versa, think of all of those scenarios.

I’m going to go over click on a specific campaign, and then I’m going to go down to settings. If I scroll down a little bit, we see this section for other settings, and here we see multimedia ads. If you find out that multimedia ads perform better in certain cases, you can add campaign or ad group level bid increases.

Yes, if I do scroll over, it’s just increases, you cannot decrease this amount. So if I go over, I typed in 10% on purpose, because you have to increase within the ranges of 20% or 900%. Again, this can only be done at the campaign or ad group levels.

Another feature which is newer, and also not available to every account at this moment is enabling product offers within your multimedia ads. So you’d have to have a merchant center store created with a feed uploaded, then you can look within that store, choose all products, look under your filtered products, choose the proper country and then go and create a new multimedia ad that could start showing the product information.

As you can see, it is fairly easy to do. If you’ve been running responsive search and display ads for a while, it’s extremely similar. Again, this feature is not available in every account yet. It’s still rolling out. So if you don’t have it, you might just have to wait a little bit.

Microsoft has also announced that new features will be coming to the multimedia ad format, one of the new features will be videos. It’s probably going to tie in a little bit to the video extensions which we already made a video on right here, and I will commonly say images and videos are going to be more engaging than just a text ad format. So this is another way that Microsoft ads is differentiating themselves from Google, by giving us more options to engage with our target audience.

It was a fairly quick run-through, but if you have any questions on how you can create or implement these within your campaigns, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez