Microsoft Advertising doesn’t want to be left out of the game. Microsoft’s advertising platform has identified the arrival of a new consumer, a person who is working on his computer, but at that moment decides to make an online purchase. This profile, which is known as the ‘workday consumer’, which in English is called the worker consumer or the consumer workday .
The rise of hybrid working in the last two years has blurred the line between work and personal life for many people, leading to some changes in the way consumers search for and buy products online during their workday. Whether they’re ordering groceries between meetings or booking their vacation while taking a five-minute break on their couch, remote workers are taking more time to shop for products and services from their computer.
According to a global survey conducted in February this year by the market research firm Forrester, 62% of consumers make purchases while working and 51% stated that they have increased the number of purchases made online during business hours, from beginning of the pandemic.
“Seeing this ever-increasing intersection between personal and work life, we decided to launch two new advertising solutions that bridge the gap between brands and workday consumers, as they alternate their personal and professional activities throughout the day” says Mariano Medina Walker, vice president of Microsoft Advertising Latin America.
These are Microsoft Audience Network and Shopping Ads. The first is focused on creating native programmatic advertising for brands, with the promise that marketers will see a 2.8x increase in site visit rate and a 6.6x increase in conversion rate.
The second focuses on showing users a search advertisement within Microsoft Search, that is, when they search for a certain product they see the photo of the items, their price and the seller. Although advertisers can include other elements that motivate sales and increase purchase consideration almost six times, such as free shipping or offers.
But these solutions are not entirely new. They were previously launched in countries such as the United States and were also presented in beta mode in Mexico. In fact, currently 40% of the clicks recorded by one of the technology company’s retail clients come from the Shopping Ads solution.
Medina Walker reiterates that the new consumption habits after Covid-19, as well as the growing investment in digital advertising that brands make to connect with their audiences, prompted Microsoft’s advertising division to bring these tools to Mexico, which after Brazil is the second most important market for the company at a regional level.
In 2021 alone, 85,000 million pesos were invested in advertising in the country, of which more than 50% was allocated to digital platforms, according to data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).
The advantage of Microsoft Ads as a player in the advertising market, says the manager, is that it has a search engine that has 13 million unique users and more than 250 million monthly searches. The company’s advertising division also collects a great deal of data through everyday channels like Edge, Bing, Microsoft Start, Microsoft News, LinkedIn and Outlook.com.
“We know the user’s intention, the data allows us to have a very precise targeting , added to the fact that we have an audience that spends 15% more than the average on the Internet, according to Comscore,” he says.
“Reaching the right customers and providing greater reach with ranges close to 50% of daily clicks, more than 40% of qualified clicks and close to 60% of conversions, translates into lower costs, because our platforms work under the model pay per click That is our differentiating value”.
So far there is no numerical growth expectation for these solutions, since there is no comparable base. However, the new tools have very particular objectives, such as addressing the drastic change that has been seen in the behavior of workers who, since the pandemic, have adjusted the way they choose and buy the products and services they need.
