Los Angeles — In an attempt to bolster up its search graph, software outfit Microsoft has come up with a novel strategy its ad campaign. As soon as you logout of your favorite social network Facebook, you could be welcomed by a complete interactive Bing home page, along with pretty wallpaper photo and an active search box, which opens a Bing search results page in a separate tab when you search for something, according to TechCrunch reports.
According to a TechCrunch reader and MyJobLinx co-founder Raj Singh, who first discovered the ad, has a massive Facebook logout page featured a Bing search box that when used opened a Bing search results page in a separate tab.
Moreover, the software giant is Facebook’s first hand customer for the company’s new logout ads. Besides, the Bing search box is fully operational, and as soon you type in a query and press Enter, you will be taken out of Facebook to a separate Bing search results page.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook has confirmed that Bing is the number one advertiser to adopt its new logout page ad unit. The new featured placement for Bing originates from Facebook’s longtime association Microsoft, where Microsoft is an investor and provided display ads, Bing powers the social media network’s internal search engine and other features, and Facebook contributes data to Bing’s own social search features.
At its Marketing Conference over the weekend, Facebook further elaborated that over 37 million people log out every day, which offers huge potential for advertisers. The new logout ad unit is an option inside Premium On Facebook, a new paid campaign businesses can sign up for that also includes News Feed ads and Mobile app ads.
Facebook’s latest monetization approach focuses on exposing users to more ads without balling up their social experience. Because there is no social content on the logout page and people usually just wait for it to show up as a confirmation of their logout before navigating away, Facebook may see little harm in displaying an ad or sponsored functionality there.
Meanwhile, mobile news feed ads are already functional, though this new ad unit that is supposed to go live in April, but clearly some people are already seeing the latter.
Nevrtheless, Bing’s current integration with Facebook is relatively engrossed in its internal search. This is much more prominent and could help Bing strengthen its position as an alternative to Google. When you logout of Facebook, there’s a decent chance a web search is your next move. This makes Bing’s engine the most obvious choice.