| Automotive search marketers can rejoice as Microsoft Advertising announced the pilot program for Automotive Ads yesterday morning. “Automotive Ads are feed-based product ads where automotive marketers can upload all the attributes of their car inventory (make, model, year, trim, image, URLs, etc.) and showcase them on the Microsoft Bing.com SERP right rail, the Bing image results page, and native placements on the Microsoft Audience Network,” said the announcement. Why we care. The pandemic meant that fewer people felt comfortable taking public transportation, but it also put a halt to new car production. As a result, used cars were in very high demand. This meant that dealerships had to keep up with constantly changing inventory–and Microsoft’s existing options for auto advertisers wasn’t cutting it. In fact, many search marketers in the automotive space ended up creating their own tech workarounds to keep their ads up to date. The new Automotive Ads format lets auto marketers use their existing feeds (like they would on Cars.com or even Facebook Marketplace) and allows dealership advertisers to expand their reach and see the same increase in conversions they might have from Image Extensions. | 