Microsoft (MSFT) Announces Expanded Text Ads for Bing

At Bing Ads we understand that a significant percentage of our advertisers also manage paid search campaigns in Google AdWords. This means compatibility between search advertising platforms is very important to our advertisers and to us.

Recently we’ve gotten a number of questions asking if we plan to support the recently announced Expanded Text Ads format on the Bing Ads platform. The answer is yes.

With Expanded Text Ads on the Bing Network, we will embrace the trend of providing an improved text ad experience that provides more information to the customer about their destination. For advertisers, this means more clicks, increased click-through-rates and more customer traffic to your website.

What are Expanded Text Ads and what is changing?

Expanded Text Ads are designed to take advantage of all the real estate on the Bing search result pages and 60 million searchers found only on the Bing Network. This new, always mobile optimized ad format gives you greater control over your ad text to create more compelling call to actions for consumers and drive higher conversions to your business. It works seamlessly on mobile, tablet and desktop devices so you can focus more on crafting your longer ad copy and optimizing your ad text to better engage your customers before they click your ad.

The changes in the new Expanded Text Ad format will be as follows:

What does this mean for Bing Ads advertisers and partners?

Bing Ads is committed to ensure that your campaign management experience is seamless and efficient. The ability to Import from Google AdWords will ensure that you can seamlessly move your carefully crafted Expanded Text Ads between platforms. This will save you time and get you started with Expanded Text Ads on Bing Ads even faster. Best-in-class support will be available later this summer on our Web UI, Desktop Editor (as an optional upgrade) and API.

To best prepare for this upcoming change, we recommend the following:

• Speak with the vendor of your search engine marketing (SEM) tool or agency to understand their Expanded Text Ads strategy to optimize your ad copy
• Take advantage of Upgraded URLs to streamline your adoption of Expanded Text Ads
• Contact your Bing Ads account manager for more details

Availability of Expanded Text Ads in Bing Ads

We're working closely with our Bing Partners (including tool providers and API partners) to ensure that advertisers and their tools can be ready with full support of Expanded Text Ads before the end of summer 2016. Expanded Text Ads was previewed at the Bing Ads Quarterly API Call - June 2016 this morning and we encourage you to stay tuned for updates of API sandbox availability and pilot opportunities for advertisers.

Let us know your thoughts on Expanded Text Ads

For questions, we encourage you to reach out to your tool provider or directly send us feedback: [email protected].