Generally speaking, from a consumer perspective, people have more trust in sites they recognize.  Bing Ads is taking this a step forward by showing the popularity of advertiser’s websites by displaying the number of times that particular advertiser’s site has been visited in the past month, to help guide a searcher to sites that are likely trusted by others based on traffic numbers.

These are officially called “Top Ad Annotations” for those ads and sites that consistently receive higher traffic in Bing.  While the screenshot shows 100k+ as the visit numbers, it will also display for 10K+, 1M+.  The numbers are based on traffic through the Bing Yahoo Network.

There is criteria that must be met for an advertiser to be eligible to display Top Ad Annotations.  They must have a minimum 10k+ monthly visits.  But they also want to see ads with high click through rates that have a low occurrence of “quick back browser clicks from users” – signs that a site isn’t really delivering what an ad promised.

While these ad units are displayed as grey text without links, Bing Ads is also testing ones with black text and with links.  While both of these screenshots show the advertisers also displaying the new Bing Ads Twitter follower counts in these ads, they can be displayed without it.

The ads are currently running on desktop only, with plans to expand to mobile at a later date.  They are currently displayed in the US and Great Britain for English traffic.  They are only displayed on the ad units above the search results, not ones on the side bar.  There is not any separate reporting for these annotations.

Although the screenshots are both for computer companies, the most common verticals eligible for Top Ad Annotations are:

• Retail
• Travel
• Education
• Financial Services
• Auto
• QSR

This is one of many tests that Bing Ads has been running lately, including displaying categories, features and product names with Smart Annotations,  Twitter follower count, and Expanded Consumer Ratings Annotations.

If you are interested in running this annotation, and you have a minimum 10k+ monthly traffic in Bing and Yahoo, you should contact your Bing Ads rep.