Author: Bethany Rochester, Paid Search Analyst at Visuasoft

What are Microsoft Multimedia Ads? 

Multimedia Ads are formatted videos and images that are often shown either at the top or on the right-hand side of a search result. The image at the side of the result often expands and opens to a larger window, meaning customers don’t need to navigate away from the original search page. This is a huge win, considering customers often won’t click on an Ad as it takes them away from their search results. These ads allow brands and advertisers to create a more appealing and engaging ad on this often underutilised and therefore less competitive platform. 

What do Microsoft Multimedia Ads look like? 

Below are some examples of how Multimedia Ads show, including on the Search network, as well as showing how the ‘Enhanced Ad extensions’ help further push products and services while still utilising the Multimedia Ads to increase engagement. 

Top reasons to use Multimedia Ads

1. High impact - Multimedia Ads allow advertisers to showcase their brand in an attractive, rich ad format on an often overlooked advertising tool which can make it less competitive and more cost effective.  

2. Targeted -  There will only be one Multimedia Ad per page, so only one advertiser at a time can get brand exposure and grab the audience’s attention in this way.

3. You can utilise multiple assets in one ad - Multimedia ads can use imagery, text and video to create engaging ads for your customers.

Best practices for Multimedia Ads

• Utilise all asset types - including images, video and text, to allow machine learning to create relevant and engaging ads for your customers, allowing as much engagement as possible.
• Only use one Multimedia Ad per ad group - similar to a Responsive Search Ad, as this will allow you to ensure that there is no competing against yourself.
• Get the most out of the Creator Tool available - this allows images to be pulled from the site and edited in the account, including cropping and adding filters. This can save you so much time as it allows you to pick from a smaller selection of images on your site as well as ensuring that you can easily crop and manipulate without having to navigate away from Microsoft Ads. 

Future of Multimedia Ads in Microsoft Ads

Microsoft have already shared a list of the developments that will be launching soon to further enhance the effectiveness of these ads:

• Multimedia Ads for retail: Combining the power of Multimedia Ads with your product feeds from Google to Facebook.
• Additional Bing surfaces, with the new Bing experience, and expansion to the Microsoft Audience Network including ChatGPT
• New CPM-based auto-bidding strategies for Multimedia Ads.
• Additional import opportunities of your media assets from other ad platforms, including being able to import from Facebook and other Social Media platforms, to allow cross-channel strategies.
  
  

Conclusion

Multimedia Ads are a great way to further expand your reach using eye-catching imagery and video that can further highlight your ad text, in a more fun and unique way than competitors. Using these ad types can provide higher impact and more targeted ads to your audience by utilising more engaging content. These will become more commonplace in the future of ads as Google Performance Max and the Audience Network begin to appear more prominently - therefore getting ahead of the game now will give you the edge over your competitors when it comes to having the most engaging and prominent ads.