Microsoft on Thursday officially announced Multi-platform, a feature available in Smart Campaigns that enables marketers to run ads in Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Instagram platforms through its interface. 

The technology, built on artificial intelligence, can help marketers optimize budgets for performance across the platforms. 

The company began testing the platform as a Garage Project in 2020. Developers built the platform to help small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) advertise on search and social media, as well as optimize the company’s complete online marketing strategy.

The platform — originally built to take in one budget — monitors ad performance on all platforms, and spreads the budget across multiple channels while optimizing performance. It automates ad generation, extension generation, and keyword generation, Microsoft told Search & Performance Marketing Daily two years ago.

Artificial intelligence manages most of the work. Marketers who choose to do search and social advertising can run ads across Bing and Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Those who choose to run search can run ads across Bing and Google.

The original plan was to offer two types of ads: text and video. Image and text ads are served in Facebook and Instagram, and created based on the categories selected.

Marketers who are set up to run Smart campaigns in Microsoft can use the Multi-platform feature for free.

The feature allows marketers to run search ads in Microsoft and Google, and run social ads on Facebook and Instagram. Marketers also can publish and reply to comments on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Marketers can gather and analyze reports, optimize content for artificial intelligence, leverage AI for campaign management, connect ads with relevant keywords or online searches, and use Microsoft’s audience network.