• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 29, 2024

Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform and said it will soon unveil ways to gain additional insights to help advertisers tackle reporting more quickly and easily. 

The company said in a few weeks it will begin piloting a feature that can summarize the performance of a specified campaign directly from conversational chat. 

Alt text within Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform conversational chat will have the ability to answer a campaign performance summary question, for example. 

Comscore now includes generative AI (GAI) search in its overall search-market measurement analysis.

In that report, Comscore estimates that total market search volume rose more than 5% with Bing capturing the lion's share of growth. 

As search habits shift, the consumer journey within Microsoft Copilot continues to evolve opportunities for advertisers and publishers.

Since its inception, Microsoft say, Copilot has logged more than 5 billion chats.

People use Copilot to explore and make sense of the world's information through longer, more detailed searches -- and by including citations in responses, it is helping drive traffic directly to advertisers and publishers, according to Microsoft.

The signals from Comscore show how people continue to actively engaged in this new way of searching with strong growth on PC and accelerated usage on mobile. 

The data shows the significant change in consumer behavior, and Microsoft said it has observed several interesting insights.

For starters, the volume of consumer journeys that now include Copilot has grown four times faster than journeys with only traditional search. The company also sees about 80% higher engagement on ads being shown in Copilot, as compared to standard search ads.

When user journeys incorporate both Microsoft Copilot and traditional Search, there is a 30% lift in aggregate click-through rates (CTR), indicating that the synergy between the search experiences drive more value.

Some 40% of Copilot conversations initiated from a standard search query indicate a growing interest in transitioning to more engaging AI-driven conversational experiences.

Within these interactions, most ad clicks are for non-brand terms, suggesting that users are engaging with a wide range of content and exploring new topics within their conversational journeys.

In addition to longer chat prompt queries and chat messages with conversational search, 82% of ad clicks came from short chat communications in less than 60 seconds, suggesting that high-visibility strategies can quickly help advertisers deliver an engaging consumer experience.

User feedback also indicates the integration of ads is not negatively impacting their experience in Copilot.

All these signals, Microsoft said, are just the start of growth opportunities for web publishers and advertisers to engage users in this new era of AI.