MICROSOFT AUDIENCE NETWORK NOW AVAILABLE ON ANSTREX NATIVE

Spy on Native Ads on MSN.com

Hiren Shah

Published on: January 31, 2021
Last Updated on: January 31, 2021

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Announcing Addition of Microsoft Audience Network On Our Native Spy Tool

Since last one year, many of our customers have been requesting native ads data on msn.com. It was completely understandable as msn.com has been one of the top 50 web properties consistently and generates massive amount of traffic for advertisers. In fact, at the time of writing this article msn.com is ranked 34th globally with 212 million unique monthly visitors!

Well, we heard your request the first time you sent us but unfortunately it took us some time to implement it correctly. This was due to the following technical challenges:

1. MSN serves ads through Microsoft Audience Network which is not a traditional native ad-network in the sense that it has very little of its own ad inventory (limited to US and CA only).
2. Most native ads are obtained through supply partners (such as Outbrain, Taboola, MGID, Postquare, Zemanta etc) that we currently carry. However, we were not able to extract these ads from MSN because it was not shown in the form traditional native ad widget units.
3. Instead, the ads are served directly through their on-demand real time auctioning process and blended into the content feed which made it technically challenging.

Therefore, until now we were not able to show any native ads on MSN.

Not anymore! We have overcome all the technical challenges and are now able to show you all the data from MSN as described below.

Data Access and Format

Because of the technical difficulties highlighted above, we have decided to assign Microsoft Audience Network as an Ad-Network on our platform even though in some ways it is not an ad-network in traditional sense with very little of its own inventory.

You can access and filter the data by selecting MSN from the Ad-Network dropdown menu as shown in the following screenshot

In addition, to provide our users with a more complete picture, we have decided to include following information:

1. Identity of Supply Side Provider: This will definitively give you an idea on where the advertiser is buying the traffic from.
2. Vertical: MSN web property is divided into many sections such as News, Entertainment, Sports, Finance, Lifestyle etc. We have decided to include that as well in our ad units. This will help you in targeting your ads if such a targeting is actually available via your purchasing partner.

Screenshot below shows how the data is presented to our users:

Covered Geos

We are covering all the major GEOs that sends significant traffic to MSN. They are listed below:

1. Argentina
2. Australia
3. Austria
4. Belgium
5. Canada
6. Chile
7. Colombia
8. Czech Republic
9. Denmark
10. Egypt
11. Finland
12. France
13. Germany
14. Great Britain
15. Greece
16. Hong Kong
17. Hungary
18. India
19. Indonesia
20. Ireland
21. Israel
22. Italy
23. Japan
24. Korea
25. Malaysia
26. Mexico
27. Netherlands
28. New Zealand
29. Norway
30. Philippines
31. Poland
32. Portugal
33. Russia
34. Saudi Arabia
35. Singapore
36. South Africa
37. Spain
38. Sweden
39. Switzerland
40. Taiwan
41. Thailand
42. Turkey
43. United States
44. Vietnam

Examples of Ads on MSN

Below is a screenshot of random native ads seen on msn platform. As you can see, majority of ads fall under news sites, content blogs, e-commerce, and lead generation.

Additional Resources

For more information on MSN Traffic, MSN Login, MSN Minimum CPC bids and pricing and other information related to advertisers and publishers, please click on the relevant links.