• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 23, 2019

The redesign of the Microsoft Advertising platform interface should give marketers an easier and more intuitive way to manage their ad campaigns. At least that’s what the company is hoping.

On Wednesday Microsoft Advertising unveiled a preview of what developers have been working on. For many advertisers, the new user experience should feel a lot like Google Ads.

Changes at Microsoft are likely the reason for the increase in ad spend on the platform by advertisers. The advertising agency Merkle released its third-quarter 2019 report this week. On the paid side, trends were more positive for Bing, with total spending on Microsoft search ads growing 18% in the quarter, compared with the year ago. The growth outpaced Google’s.

Microsoft Product Ad spending growth also jumped between the first and third quarters of this year, the company began serving Product Ads for inventory that Yahoo had previously been allocating to Google Shopping ads.

There is more good news for the platform and advertisers. Merkle reported that spending on Microsoft’s Product Ads grew 50% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2019 -- down slightly from the growth, 54%, in the second quarter.

Microsoft text ad spending growth rose to 13% YoY, following a 5% decline a quarter earlier. While non-brand text ad growth has improved, advertisers also saw a spike in brand keyword cost per clicks.

Microsoft Advertising’s new user interface could prompt additional growth. The company said it will add a global menu bar that appears on the top of every page. Advertisers can use this to switch accounts, quickly access tools and settings like ad preview, shared library, conversion tracking, and import data from Google Ads.

The main menu will let advertisers search in specific campaign types and ad groups. Page menus adapt to display the pages and data applicable to specific campaigns.

This redesign represents a new principled design based on advertiser feedback. 

The Microsoft Fluent design provides a clean, light, and open ecosystem to help advertisers focus. Colors are different from the previous version, along with spacing around page elements, tables, graphs, and forms in order to reduce fatigue and information overload.