To create a successful business, people need to know what you’re selling. Advertising is key, whether you’re consulting on cybersecurity or creating a new tech toy. Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) is one of many avenues available for you to promote your work. If you’re already advertising on Bing, automatic opt-in means you’re also signed up for MSAN. But every advertising dollar needs to work hard for you, so you need to know whether MSAN offers a return on your investment. Discover what MSAN is and what it offers to help you decide whether to make space for it in your marketing budget.
What Is Microsoft Audience Network?
Microsoft Audience Network is Microsoft’s native advertising platform. This is a marketing option where ads have the same format and feel as non-paid content in the space. Native advertising is less intrusive than banner ads and leads to higher click-through and conversion rates.
MSAN ads are served across all Microsoft properties, including Outlook.com, MSN and Edge, plus some partner sites. This allows you to target users outside of a search. Bing Ads, now known as Microsoft Advertising, continues to serve ads in the search engine.
Like most internet advertising options, MSAN uses a wide range of information to place ads in front of a target audience. This includes:
- User data
- Intent
- Profile
- Location
- Device
- App downloads
- LinkedIn activity
Unlike other platforms that primarily use data collected from internet use, Microsoft connects information from Windows operating systems and Office 365 as well as search history, browsing habits and more.
How Does the Automatic Opt-In Work?
Microsoft has released data showing that combining search advertising with native advertising leads to more site visits and a 6.6 times higher conversion rate when compared to just search ads. Given that, they decided to link their Microsoft Advertising and MSAN offerings. Essentially, anyone who advertises on Bing’s network is automatically enrolled in MSAN.
When this was first introduced, it was possible to opt out of MSAN by adjusting bid level modifiers. Decreasing your bid level to 0% meant you wouldn’t spend any money on MSAN ads. However, these modifiers have been deprecated, so the workaround no longer has an effect. Now, there’s no easy way to opt out of MSAN. Users have reported that the only way to not use MSAN is to contact Bing support and ask them to remove it for you.
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of MSAN?
Being a native ad platform, MSAN has all the benefits of naturally blending ads into your target audience’s daily internet use:
- Builds awareness
- Reminds potential customers of your product
- Drives more conversion
Microsoft also has some added advantages. As it’s a lot smaller than Google Ads and not used by as many businesses, advertising on MSAN tends to be cheaper. There’s less competition, meaning lower auction prices. Using MSAN in addition to Google ads also provides additional volume for your ads, reaching people who don’t use Google for searches.
Demographic data strongly suggests that people who see MSAN ads tend to be older, be more affluent and have more money to spend. However, some others say Microsoft’s target audience better targets students and young professionals than its traditional search engine. Either way, the huge amount of data MSAN uses to segment the audience means you can be very specific when choosing who’ll see your products.
Despite all those advantages, MSAN’s automatic opt-in can be troublesome. There have been reports of large increases in ad spend with very little return on investment. MSAN may not work well for your product or service, but it’s difficult to separate it from Bing ads. Testing efforts into MSAN display data quality challenges for those focused on Lead Generation as well as traffic quality challenges when CPCs exceed $1.00 per click. Further, Bing’s algorithm still struggles to price the ad inventory with respect to its quality.
Essentially, Microsoft is taking away an important control you have over your advertising by forcing Advertisers to accept their less quality traffic similar to Google Ads networks of third-parties. When every ad dollar is important, this lack of control could ruin your marketing campaign and mean overspending with Microsoft.
Whether MSAN works for you will depend on your business goals and budget. As with all marketing campaigns, it’s important to track how much money you spend and what return you get for that investment. With that information, you’ll be able to determine if MSAN is bringing you more revenue or if you should opt out of Microsoft advertising altogether should the forced poor traffic negatively impacts your overall ROI goal achievement.
