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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Microsoft Advertising

    Score7.7 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) contains Microsoft's advertising solutions. Advertising formats include search (Microsoft Search ads), Display and Native ads, Retail Media, and Video and Connected TV (CTV) ads. Services include Performance Max, the company's conversion optimization AI assistant and guide.N/A

    OpenX

    Score1 out of 10
    N/AOpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each ad placement.N/A
    Pricing
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    OpenX
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    68%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    70%
    Delivers good value for the price
    21 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    65%
    Happy with the feature set
    20 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    59%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    17 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    67%
    Implementation went as expected
    20 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Ad Campaigns
    Comparison of Ad Campaigns features of Microsoft Advertising and OpenX
    Feature
    Microsoft Advertising
    6.5
    6 Ratings
    0% above category average
    OpenX
    7.0
    5 Ratings
    11% below category average
    Ad campaign creation8.06 Ratings6.85 Ratings
    Ad deployment8.36 Ratings6.65 Ratings
    Display advertising6.46 Ratings7.35 Ratings
    Ad display and retargeting segmentation6.46 Ratings6.55 Ratings
    Sequence targeting5.95 Ratings7.54 Ratings
    Contextual advertising5.56 Ratings00 Ratings
    Social advertising4.95 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ad Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Ad Reporting & Analytics features of Microsoft Advertising and OpenX
    Feature
    Microsoft Advertising
    6.6
    8 Ratings
    4% below category average
    OpenX
    6.6
    5 Ratings
    16% below category average
    Ad dashboards6.28 Ratings5.95 Ratings
    Ad performance reports6.87 Ratings6.05 Ratings
    Ad conversion tracking7.36 Ratings6.15 Ratings
    Ad attribution reporting7.06 Ratings7.04 Ratings
    Ad forecasting and optimization5.85 Ratings7.64 Ratings
    Cross-channel ad management00 Ratings7.25 Ratings
    Ad Auctions
    Comparison of Ad Auctions features of Microsoft Advertising and OpenX
    Feature
    Microsoft Advertising
    7.3
    7 Ratings
    14% below category average
    OpenX
    -
    Ratings
    Ad bidding7.37 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ad Network Integration
    Comparison of Ad Network Integration features of Microsoft Advertising and OpenX
    Feature
    Microsoft Advertising
    -
    Ratings
    OpenX
    6.6
    3 Ratings
    11% below category average
    Data Transfer00 Ratings6.53 Ratings
    DSP integration00 Ratings6.83 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Small Businesses
    WordStream
    Score6.9 out of 10
    AdRoll
    Score3.7 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    WordStream
    Score6.9 out of 10
    Criteo Commerce Growth
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Criteo Commerce Growth
    Score8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.4
    (70 ratings)
    7.3
    (15 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    7.9
    (4 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.1
    (11 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Microsoft AdvertisingOpenX
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    Despite using our account for advertising with every other social media company, Microsoft flagged ours as fraudulent. After dealing with them for weeks, we finally got to a manager, who said that they didn’t know anything, couldn’t provide any information, and was unable to do anything about it. It seems odd, but it would flagger account every time we try to upload the campaigns from Google directly into their ad manager. I would suggest if you try and use their platform, don’t tell them you’re using Google cause they seem to have a thing against it. Once your account is flagged, they have no reasonable way of resolving it, nor they are able to offer any support. You’re better off to just try a different way. Ultimately, just don’t use Microsoft advertising if you can possibly avoid it. Hopefully soon DuckDuckGo will have their own advertising platform and we can eliminate Microsoft given the terrible time we have working with this one of many, social media platforms.
    Read full review
    OpenX
    What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com? What are the best ways to target our users with this tool? To segment the users? How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Familiar interface, offers editor for bulk changes, adding negative keywords is much easier than in Google Ads
    • Nice reporting tools within the interface, detailed reports can be made fairly easily
    • Had very nice tools to help import/export ads directly from Google Ads, which saves a ton of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    • OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures.
    • The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible
    • The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels.
    • The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL)
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • Bing's ad platform could definitely use some improvements - it hasn't been updated in a long time, and it feels very outdated.
    • We feel that the optimization algorithms don't always perform as well for Bing Ads as they do in Google Ads (optimize for conversions, etc.).
    • It would be great to have even more integrations with LinkedIn audience targeting offered - right now, you can just make some bid optimizations in a couple of areas; we'd really like to get more robust options there, and maybe even things like cross-platform tracking.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    • Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate.
    • Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary.
    • Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    We have had good success with it over all of our clients. We continually recommend bing to reach "the rest of the searchers".
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    I no longer work at the company where I was using OpenX, but if I were then I'd certainly stay aboard. Frankly, there are a lot of sunk costs involved with building all of the infrastructure we had put in place, the system was working very well even if reporting was a hassle, and our team was trained on it. Also, I'm not aware of another product that does everything else we'd need it to.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    It's very easy to use overall. It has an import from Google Ads to make things simpler. Overall, I would say you can get up and running very quickly. It's similar to other platforms, so if you have used them, it's intuitive.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    Our Bing Ads reps are very good and attentive. They've offered good recommendations and are quick to resolve unexpected issues and problems. Occasionally they have roped in technical support folks that have been friendly and helpful too. The general helpline for Bing Ads is also very good, especially when compared to Google's customer support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    Obviously Google is a huge competitor. Typically Google is top of the game for many advertising solutions including search. Microsoft ads has a lower scale and reach compared to Google. However, Microsoft ads audience does not overlap much with Googles, providing incremental reach. Although Microsoft ads lags a bit behind in adapting the new updates that Google comes out with, their customer service is very good and they are likely to go out of their way to adapt their platform to your needs whereas their competitor does not
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    OpenX is less focused than MoPub and it has a bigger reach as it is not limited to the mobile app. Unlike MoPub that focuses on performance, OpenX comes from the branding world and is pushing into CTV and other areas of the industry more catered to traditional media agencies and not pure ad tech players.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • We've had a very hard time spending our budgets on Bing which has caused us a lot of extra work on our end. We've essentially had to move that money back to Google or other platforms.
    • It does have an easy import from Google so you're not doubling efforts.
    • The CPCs tend to be less expensive than Google - which is always good for business owners.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenX
    • OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.
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    ScreenShots