• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 4, 2015

Microsoft Bing Ads will begin testing native ads on MSN.com, with plans to extend the advantage onto other platforms. Initial testing will begin in Q2 2015, with a beta rollout during the second half of the year. The company also plans to introduce mobile app extensions and a remarketing tool.

When asked about extending the native ads into wearable devices such as Microsoft Fit Band, Steve Sirich, general manager for Bing Ads product marketing, said "we're not serving ads into the Microsoft Fit Band, but the opportunity for native may fit, no pun intended, in that type of supply." He said the company is looking into other areas to extend the ad format, but couldn't say how that might look or serve up.

David Pann, GM for the search network at Microsoft, told Search Marketing Daily in October the company planned to build out a third-party ad publisher network, similar to Google AdSense, placing premium high-quality ads on publisher sites supported by Bing and Bing Ads. Sirich said the native ads running on MSN.com are part of this strategy.

Native advertising should reach $8.8 billion by 2018, up from $2.2 billion in 2013, per eMarketer.

Microsoft continues make investments in mobile. The company will release mobile app extension for developers, followed by the app install extension. Bing will begin rolling out mobile app extensions in March. With supporting apps served across Apple, Android and Windows phones, the tool will allow users to download the app after clicking on the extension.

For Bing, clicks on mobile devices tripled with double the volume in the past year, per Sirich. In Q4 2014, search marketers running Yahoo Gemini campaigns saw the share of their Bing and Yahoo mobile traffic produced by Gemini jump from about 4% at the start of Q3 to nearly 27% at the end of Q4, per the Digital Marketing report Q4 2014 report from Merkle RKG.

In addition to native advertising, Microsoft also plans to introduce remarketing for Bing Ad in search as part of the Universal Event Tracking platform launched in October. The company next week will start to pilot bid boosting with a select set of partners, allowing advertisers to remarket when they know a particular consumer has been on their site previously, Sirich said.

Reading an email on a mobile device would trigger a signal to look for the brand's app on the smartphone. If the app isn't found, the link would open the relevant Web page instead.

“Deep linking within apps is an important capability both for our Bing searchers and our advertising customers looking to deliver the most relevant ad experience related to a searcher's intent. We are working on a solution in this area. While we do not have specifics to share at this time, we expect to have more information available later this year.”