Microsoft Video Ads

Just last week, Microsoft Ads announced video ads and this is not to be confused with the video extensions. If you’re curious about video extensions, you can watch this video right here but, in several countries, advertisers can now create dedicated video campaigns. These have their own goal and they live solely on the audience network. So, in this video, we will show you how to set up a video ads campaign, we’ll show you the targeting options you have for the audience network and then we’ll walk through the specs for your videos that you will need in order to these campaigns.

Before we jump to the video ads campaign creation, I wanted to show you an example that Microsoft provided of how video ads could look within the audience network. Microsoft has already put the light blue frame around the ad example and it’s showing you how it has that native responsive feel. The ad is going to blend in with a lot of the articles and stuff that are part of the audience network. The best example for Microsoft would be “MSN.com”. So usually, the space in the upper left-hand corner of the MSN homepage has a scrolling menu of different articles and every once in a while, as you’re scrolling through the options, you will hit an ad. Pretty much every example I found right now has been an image because video ads are so new. But instead of just image ads showing up there, you will now be able to run videos.

To showcase another example, let’s just create our own. I am in the Microsoft Ads desktop interface and as you can see in the navigation, I’m in the campaign’s view. So, to create any new campaign, all I have to do is go down to the blue create button and click on it and just like any campaign, we have to select the goal of the campaign. We can easily see the new red tags for a couple new campaign goals and of course, we’re going to want video views. Now, the announcement of video ads campaigns was only made two days ago from the recording of this video. So, as of right now, we can only create video ads campaigns in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. And also, to clarify, video ads will only serve in those countries.

This is a very common thing with new roll outs in Microsoft Ads. First, they’re going to start in a few select countries but I could easily assume it rolling out globally at some point in the future. So, it’s pretty much easy to see the goal of the campaign because it’s called Video Views, but if I click on the question mark, you get a little bit more clarification. The main purpose of this goal is brand awareness. I know we can run conversion style video campaigns within Google Ads but certain features like companion banners or call-to-action extensions are not available currently for Microsoft Video Ads. Your main goal when running this type of campaign is to try to get as many eyeballs as possible on the video that you want to play, and then if you look down a little bit further at the what you need to know section, as I said in the intro, these are going to appear solely on Microsoft’s audience network. So, let’s click on this goal and start creating our video ads campaign.

First, you’ll have to name your campaign and then choose your budget or apply from a shared library. I’m just going to leave it as is. So, let’s save and go to the next step. I’m going to go up and name my ad group. Typically, I would name it with whatever targeting options I’ve selected, be a little bit more specific than what I’m doing right now but here we get the targeting options for the audience network. One of the main benefits of running ads on the audience network is that we get to use the targeting feature or the LinkedIn targeting options. We already have a video talking about LinkedIn targeting options and Microsoft Ads. You could check that video here but those specific LinkedIn targeting options will be choosing specific companies focusing on specific industries or select specific job functions that a user has put within their LinkedIn profile.

In addition to LinkedIn targeting, there’s other options that we can layer on. Like location, the default option is going to be all available countries and regions and even though this is selected, it’s only going to be eligible for the 7 countries that I mentioned earlier. So, you would want to choose your location targeting, the impression estimate updated as I changed my location targeting. Next, you can look at age, all options are going to be selected, uncheck any of the ones that you feel are not appropriate for your video ads campaign. Heading back up we can look at gender. Going back down Microsoft only offers female, male and unknown then we can look at audience. We can see that we can add audiences to target as well as exclude certain audiences.

So, if we look at adding targeting to this ad group, I can click on the drop down and we see that audiences are more than just your remarketing list. However, if you do want to set up remarketing, you need to make sure that you have the Microsoft Universal Event Tag on your website. Hopefully, that is one of the first things you have done when you’ve set up a Microsoft Ads account. But if you’re brand new to the platform, you can go up to tools and under conversion tracking, there’s the UET tag. Just follow the step-by-step instructions there. Make sure it’s recording properly and once it’s on every page of your site, you can start going into audiences to create a variety of remarketing audiences. I’m not going to get into that since this video is about the video ads and not remarketing audiences.

But within the audience network besides remarketing, you can also create custom similar audiences off of any of the other ones that are already created. Microsoft’s version of in-market audiences. You can upload your customer list if you only want to show your video ads to specific people if you have their first party information and you’ve collected the information with their permission and then a combined list would be an audience that you could create from a combination of any of the other audiences mentioned. So, for this example, since I’m going to use a Paid Media Pros video, I’m just going to choose an in-market audience. I’m Gonna focus in on a specific area and just choose the SEO and SEM services. Okay, that’s good enough for now but then remember, we can also add exclusions.

So, let’s say I wanted to keep this very high level. Focus on new users who may not have heard of us before. From there, I would choose to exclude my remarketing list. Most likely as well as any customer list, but we don’t have any. So, now I have people who visited our website excluded, only trying to focus on new users. That’s a pretty quick review of audiences and now, we’re going to get into LinkedIn targeting. Maybe you only want to show your video to people who work at specific companies. This is essentially turning your video ads campaign into an ABM campaign. Now, unlike LinkedIn which has company list targeting and we have a video on that right here, you currently cannot upload a list of companies to target on Microsoft’s audience network. You really have to go in and search for them one by one.

So, I just typed in Microsoft, hit enter, scrolling down a little bit and there we see options. Logo’s not loading right now, usually does, which does make it easier to discern which one is the real one you go after. But then I can just target a specific company and there we see it’s down on the list. Then I would just have to go back up, type in each new company name and add it to the list. One thing I will say with company targeting is not every company that you can see on LinkedIn is going to show up within the search results within Microsoft. I don’t know the exact qualifications, but I’m going to assume that the company needs to have a certain size for it to appear in your search results when you’re looking for it.

I’m going to skip the next targeting option a little bit because right now I just have selected Microsoft. There are of people at Microsoft who may not be interested in what I’m trying to sell. Lot of different job roles. So, you can get specific and then just hone in on specific job functions. Going back down again, we can see options for education, community social services. Most likely, I wouldn’t want to show my video ads to the legal team, to the engineers, to any admin or HR. I probably want to focus in on just the marketing team. As you could see, we can proactively exclude certain job functions too. So, as I just said, I don’t want to show my video to Microsoft’s HR team or their IT team. These are all just examples for the sake of this demo. You’re just going to have to consider what works best for you depending on which target audience you are trying to reach.

Then up to the last option, using LinkedIn targeting option is going to be the industry. Makes it difficult, because I already have company selected. If you’re not honing in on specific companies or specific remarketing audiences, you could search or go through a variety of different industries. If you just focus in on an industry, it could have a wider reach for your video ads. But you can still try to focus in on the right professional audience who would be interested in your video and the products or services that you are trying to promote. So, I’m going to head down after I’ve selected all of my targeting options and I’ll save and go to the next step.

Now, we get to create our video ad. First, I’m going to go up and add the video. For this ad format, you are going to need the actual video file. So, in my case, brand new to this campaign type, I’m going to upload one from my desktop. While my videos process, I want to talk about a few things. As you can see right here, when you upload a video, Microsoft can create multiple versions of it using different aspect ratios. We’ll then want to use the ad preview a little bit in the lower right corner to see if the ad that we uploaded would look good within each of the ad sizes. This is because all audience network ads are responsive. The video that you upload must be at least 6 seconds and cannot be longer than 120 seconds or 2 minutes.

We see the aspect ratios are out under each preview there’s the range from 16:9, 9:16. So, you can see the horizontal and the vertical versions. The minimum resolution must be at least 120×120 pixels, but Microsoft recommends that you have at least 720×720 pixels. And last, the maximum video file size is 10 gigabytes. Probably not too hard if 2 minutes is the max. So, it took about a little over a minute for the video to process and upload. If I scroll down on the page a little bit, we to get an idea of what the video will look like and it’s going to give us the aspect ratio. I can keep sliding through, but we can do that once again at the end. Within each of the different aspect ratios, you can click on the pencil and individually replace the video for each different aspect ratio. In our case, that would be something I would consider. It looks good on the 16:9 ratio. Looks okay on the five to four but on the last three, it’s looking kind of small.

I don’t have any other videos to replace it with, but maybe I would look at editing this video to fit these specific ratios, crop it in my video editing tool, and then add in separate ones especially from the vertical video size. If I click on another pencil, the option is the same. All I can do is replace it. I cannot remove the specific placement. It’s an all-or-nothing thing. Definitely something important to keep in mind, because if you don’t like how your ad looks here and it doesn’t look good with all the gray space above and below it, then maybe you hold off on running video ads until you have the proper creative specs to fit each of these aspect ratios. But after you have your video selected, let’s go down and finish creating the rest of the ad. Just paste it in the final URL and similar to like a responsive display ad, we will need a short headline and a long headline. So first, let me enter in something in for the short headline and then I can enter in my long headline. In case you missed it, the short headline can have 30 characters. Your long headline can have 90 characters and then we get 90 characters for the ad text.

Next, you get 25 characters for your business name and then if you want to, add in a separate URL for mobile. I’m not going to go over any of the URL tracking off. But once you have all the information put in, you can click play. I have it muted, so it’s not going to come through while I’m talking. But there we see options of what our video ad could look like. If I do keep scrolling, we see this is an MSN in article ad. There’s the homepage so we really only get just a small sample of the preview. Scrolling down a little bit. I can click Save and then you can go ahead and create another ad. Since these are video ads, your video creative will be the best thing to test if you really want to optimize the performance. It’s going to be the main thing that user sees and pay attention to. But if you can’t get different video creative, still create a few different versions and just update the headlines and descriptions within the videos and see if that makes any difference.

For now, I’m just going to run with the one. So, I’m going to save, go to the next step. There you can update the daily budget. Yes, daily budget was available in the first step when we first created the campaign settings. But you can adjust it here. You want to change your mind and then choose the bid strategy. You can focus on cost per click. Try to get more people to click to your website or you have cost per view or CPM. If you’re more focused on reach and getting eyeballs watching your video ads instead of sending users to your website. With the daily budget that I have selected and looking at the default 10 cent bid that Microsoft has put in place. We get simple estimates on impressions, views, clicks, click the rate, CPV (cost per view), and overall spend. Besides views and engagement metrics, you can select your conversions, choose to add any bid adjustments and which could be important to you. If I scroll down a little bit, you could select your ads. But if everything looks good, we can save our campaign.

Now, because of the video extensions I mentioned in the intro, there are already video columns that you can look when reviewing your reporting. If you head up to columns, click modify columns, you can search for specific video ones but they pretty much live within the performance option. There we see already, there’s video views, your view through rate, average CPV, total watch time, the percentage that the user viewed the video, completed videos will be your 100% as well as your completion rate. Honestly a lot of the same columns we get for video campaigns within Google. So, what I like to do is remove all of the selected columns. I’ll go back up, add unusual ones like impressions, clicks, spend. Depending on your bid strategy maybe you chose average CPM, but then I’ll just go right down the line add in all of my video options and then save the specific set of columns. I’ll click apply, so then when my video campaign is live it’s been running for a little bit, I can just review the metrics that are important just for my video ads. Depending on how they perform yes you can add your conversion information there, it all depends on what the goals are of what you want to achieve with video ads.

Since these are so new, I haven’t tested them out on a client yet but I already have a few ideas of what I want to do for my clients. The fact that we can use remarketing and customer list is going to be very appealing to a few of my clients especially the ones that already have video creative for that next step engagement. Since Michelle and I have a lot of lead gen clients and video campaigns on LinkedIn tend to be more expensive, I can now go to my clients and say, we can run video ads to people who work the same companies but on Microsoft’s audience network. And it gives us unique targeting options for our lead gen clients that we just cannot get with Google and YouTube. So, there you see how easy it is to set up video ads within Microsoft.

If you really focus on brand awareness or looking for a different engaging way to reach your audience. Microsoft Ads is an affordable way to test out a new video campaign. As I already said, we haven’t tested this out yet, but I’m definitely going to in the next couple weeks. But if you have any other questions on how video ads or the Microsoft Audience Network works, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez