Accord Marketing chief client officer Maria Payne discusses how best to advertise cruise holidays.

A new era of cruising calls for new and inspiring ways to advertise cruise. Let me introduce you to Microsoft Cruise Ads.

Launched in February 2022, these are rich and eye-catching ad solutions that showcase images with timely and relevant information, designed to meet the unique needs of the cruise industry.

So how do they work?

These vertical-specific ad formats appear on the right-hand side of the Microsoft Bing search results and alongside standard text ad placements.

They use feed data to match cruise offers to searches, showing the user current prices, destination and departure ports, cruise length and (coming soon) ratings, reviews, inclusions and itinerary links.

A more targeted cruise ad experience

Queries like cruise name, location and length will automatically trigger the ads to appear, so no need for keywords. However, negative keywords can be used for optimisation.

So why use Cruise Ads? Well beyond the obvious appeal of them being something new, eye-catching and inspiring for scrolling dreamers and planners, they are a way for advertisers to deliver a more targeted cruise holiday ad experience that reaches larger volumes for more value.

Driving higher quality clicks, Cruise Ads will save marketers time, with a more hands-off approach and easy set up. Sounds like a win-win to us.

To talk Microsoft Ads or if you’re curious to learn more about what we can offer, or how we can work together, contact me at [email protected].