Microsoft Video Ads

Key Takeaways

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 run 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 from Microsoft would be msn.com so usually the space in the upper left hand corner of the MSN home page 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 am in the campaigns 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 other 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 has been a very common thing with new rollouts 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 we're 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 can check that video here but those specific LinkedIn targeting options will be choosing specific companies focusing on specific Industries or selecting 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 seven 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 audiences 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 lists 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 pay media Pros video I'm just going to choose an in-market audience I'm going to 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's the real one you want to go after but then I can just Target a specific company and there we see it's down on the list and then I 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 heavy 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 but there are a lot of people at Microsoft who may not be interested in what I'm trying to sell a 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 mark marketing team as you can 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 HRT or their it team and these are all just examples for the sake of this demo you're just gonna have to consider what works best for you depending on which target audience you are trying to reach and 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 still 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 were 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 video is processing 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 add 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 six seconds and cannot be longer than 120 seconds or 2 minutes we see the aspect ratios are called out under each preview there's the range from 16 to 9 9 to 16. so you can see the horizontal and the vertical versions the minimum resolution must be at least 120 by 120 pixels but Microsoft recommends that you have at least 720 by 720 pixels and last the maximum video file size is 10 gigabytes probably not too hard if two minutes is the max so it took about a little over a minute but the video to process and upload if I scroll down on the page a little bit we start 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 to 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 this 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 to 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 hand line can have 90 characters and then we get 90 characters for the add 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 options 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 and article ad there's the home page 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 a user sees and pays 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 if 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 ad schedule 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 and 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 this specific set of columns and 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 in 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 lists 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 and 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 at 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're really focused 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 thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below liked it maybe think ing subscribing to the page Pros YouTube Channel you'll get alerted every time a new video drops if you really really liked it you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button