Earlier this year, Bing announced the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN), a new Display network powered by the Microsoft Graph (the API for Microsoft 365) and artificial intelligence (AI). This network was previously called Native Ads and is now enhanced by user intent and audience data from the Microsoft Graph:

The part of this rollout we’ve been particularly excited to test is leveraging LinkedIn data. We recently got our accounts opted into this Beta, so I wanted to share a walkthrough of the setup process to help you save time in your account.

Getting Started with Microsoft Audience Network [Beta]

As audience ads leveraging LinkedIn data is currently in Beta, you’ll need to first reach out to your Bing rep to get this feature enabled in your account.

To help get the ball rolling for this a little quicker, you’ll want to send your creative assets in your request email and ensure they comply with Bing Ads guidelines. Since this campaign type uses Responsive ads, the recommended sizes are 1200×628 for a landscape image and 1200×1200 for a square image. If you don’t have those sizes available, you will have the option to crop them during the ad creation process, but if you can get your hands on the recommended sizes you’ll save yourself some headaches.

Once you’ve sent in your request, it takes about 24 hours to get your account opted in.

Campaign Setup

Once this Beta has been enabled, you can simply click on the green Create Campaign button in the interface to start. From there, you’ll choose your campaign goal and a box will pop up with the Audience Ads option:

From there, you’ll name your campaign and set a daily budget.

Ad Group Targeting

After that, you’ll name your ad group and choose from the following targeting options: Location, Age, Gender, Audience, Company, Industry and Job Function.

All ages and genders are automatically selected, but you can click their respective boxes to opt out of certain ones if you’d like.

For the Audience option, this is where you can choose to layer in additional audiences for targeting from Remarketing lists, Product audiences or In-Market audiences, and you can choose audiences to exclude.

The last three options, Company, Industry and Job Function, are all based on LinkedIn profile data.

As you go through and choose your targeting, you’ll see the audience reach estimator on the right-hand side adjust accordingly:

Once you’ve got your targeting in place just save and go to the next step.

Ad Creation

At this point, you’ll upload your images, as well as your Responsive ad text with the following character maximums:

• Short Headline – 25 characters
• Long Headline – 90 characters
• Ad Text – 90 characters
• Business name – 25 characters
• URL/Mobile URL – 1024 characters

You’ll see a preview of your ad in different formats to the right. Then Save and go to the next step to finish the setup process.

Final Steps

From here, you can choose your bid strategy (Manual or Enhanced CPC) and your default bid:

You can also set specific bid modifiers for each of your targeting layers as well as ad scheduling:

Once you finalize and save your campaign, all ads are manually reviewed and approval takes 24-48 hours, so keep that in mind when doing your campaign planning.

Tips for Maximizing Performance

Our campaigns are still very new, so initial learnings are limited for us so far, but we got some helpful recommendations from our rep:

• Take the estimator numbers for audience reach with a grain of salt since this is just a pilot.
• Try to be in position 2-3 because advertisers so far are seeing that positions 4 and below are off the page.
• CPCs are cheap right now, so you have room to be more aggressive with your bidding.
• Bing is throttling volume a bit so far in this pilot stage, so advertisers have found they can pretty quickly switch from Standard to Accelerated delivery without blowing through the budget to help maximize campaign reach.

In Conclusion

Ultimately, we’re excited to continue testing this new targeting feature and learn all we can. Especially since CPCs on LinkedIn tend to be high in order to be competitive, we’re looking forward to maximizing the low CPCs for LI targeting through Bing, at least for now.

Have you tried the Bing audience ads leveraging LinkedIn data yet? Let us know your tips in the comments below!