Bing Ads testing Social Extensions: Link search ads to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr

Want to promote your social channels in your search ads? Bing Ads is testing Social Extensions to help businesses do just that.

“Businesses today spend a lot of time and resources to engage customers on social media and use paid search to drive traffic. Bing Ads team believes it’s time to build a bridge between two,” says Aurea Astro, program manager for Bing Ads Platform in a blog post announcing the beta.

Social Extensions appear under the ad copy of text ads and can be used to link right to advertisers’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr accounts. The network icons appear next to each link, which can include a hashtag. Users will be able to click on any of the links and go to the advertiser’s profile on the respective network.

For brands and businesses that are active on social, this could be an interesting way to try to direct users to those channels. Advertisers have sometimes used sitelinks for this purpose, but how/if those display isn’t as consistent as the Social Extension would appear to be.

Of course, this can start to muddy measurement and attribution waters, so advertisers will need to think that through. But, particularly in light of social becoming a growing channel for customer service, it’s easy to see scenarios in which businesses would want to highlight social channels and give customers a way to quickly connect on the network of their choice with just one search.

The test is currently running in the US. If you want in on the beta, reach out to your Bing Ads account rep. Bing Ads is also soliciting feedback on this feature on its own social channels, so drop a comment if you’d like to see it roll out more broadly.