Microsoft Advertising is introducing health insurance ads as a pilot program, the company announced Tuesday. The new format is now eligible to serve for advertisers targeting U.S. customers.

Where and when health insurance ads can appear. Like Microsoft Advertising’s other vertical-specific ad offerings (automotive ads, tours and activities ads and credit card ads), health insurance ads appear on the right-hand rail of Bing search results (as shown above), running alongside mainline text ads.

These ads can trigger for non-branded queries, such as generic medicare or plan-type queries, although promoting specific plans is not currently supported.

How to use this ad type. To enroll in the pilot program, contact your Microsoft Advertising representative or the support team. 

Keywords are not required and Microsoft Advertising does not need to crawl your site to generate content for this ad format. Instead, health insurance ads are dynamically generated based on advertisers’ data feeds, leveraging data such as your plan type, organization category, federal registration status and URLs.

Why we care. This new ad product can help health insurance providers get in front of searchers, which may be especially important given the upcoming annual enrollment period. Additionally, health insurance ads are dynamically generated, which may help advertisers save time.

This is the fourth vertical-specific ad type Microsoft Advertising has introduced this year and they are all similar in that they’re intent-triggered, appear on the right-hand rail of results and are dynamically generated based on a feed. Maintaining this formula across ad products can also help PPC professionals, particularly those at agencies, more easily get this ad type going for different clients since the requirements and placements are all the same.