+12% credit-card sales, year on year, at 82% lower cost per click.

Who, and why now01Context

Akbank is one of Türkiye’s leading private banks, and a credit card is a digital product: application, decision and first purchase can all happen without a branch. Card acquisition is therefore a performance-marketing problem, and the established channels for it are crowded and expensive.

Microsoft Advertising was not one of those channels; there was no account. APH initiated the relationship, onboarded the bank and opened the account, on the case that the Microsoft Audience Network — native placements across MSN, Outlook, Microsoft Edge and the partner network, targeted on Microsoft’s own intent signals — could reach people the bank’s other channels did not.

What they wanted02The brief

Increase new digital credit-card applications and sales by reaching net-new, high-intent customers without cannibalising existing channels. The second half is the hard part: a channel that merely reassigns conversions already happening elsewhere adds cost, not cards. The new line had to be additive, at a cost that held up against everything else Akbank was buying.

What was built03The approach

Start with intent, then expand — the heading Microsoft gives the strategy. In the account it ran as four steps.

1. 00
   Account build · APHOnboarding and the account itself

   APH initiated the relationship, onboarded Akbank and opened the Microsoft Advertising account as Microsoft Advertising Channel Partner, then ran and grew it. The bank’s agency, Optdcom, is credited in Microsoft’s published case.

2. 01
   Intent firstIn-market audiences on search intent

   Microsoft Audience ads targeted at in-market audiences — people whose search behaviour already signalled that they were looking for a card. Intent was the entry point, so the first conversions were the most likely to be net-new.

3. 02
   Then expandNative placements across MSN, Outlook and Microsoft Edge

   Native ads across MSN, Outlook, Microsoft Edge and the Microsoft partner network, with first-party signals layered on the in-market audiences to widen reach without loosening the intent filter.

4. 03
   2025 · optimise and scaleCreative and bidding optimisation

   Precise targeting combined with the creatives that worked, and bidding tuned as the account grew to a five-figure monthly media budget. By August 2025, results were 2.5× higher than in the earlier months of the campaign.

What happened04The results

15% more credit-card applications, 12% higher credit-card sales year on year, an 82% lower cost per click than Akbank’s other campaigns, and 16% of digital sales coming from Audience ads within eight months. All four figures are as published by Microsoft Advertising in its Akbank case study of 5 June 2026.

The four bars are not the same kind of number, so each carries its basis. Two are lifts: applications up 15%, sales up 12% on the year before. One is a cost: a click on Audience ads cost 82% less than a click on Akbank’s other campaigns. One is a share: within eight months, 16% of digital sales came from a channel that had not existed in the plan.

The ramp is the single most useful number for a planner: it says the channel scaled. The earlier months are indexed to 1×; August 2025 sits at 2.5×, on a budget that had grown with the results rather than ahead of them.

Sixteen per cent answers the brief. A channel that cannibalised existing sales would show as a reshuffled share and flat totals; here the share arrived alongside a 12% rise in credit-card sales year on year, so the remaining 84% was not shrinking to make room for it.

In the client’s words05Client quote

“Akbank enhanced its innovative approach in digital sales with Microsoft Audience ads. Through our collaboration with Optdcom, we increased credit card sales by combining precise targeting with powerful creatives, setting a benchmark for measurable success in the industry.”

Ayşin Gültepe, Senior Manager, Digital Sales & Growth, Akbank · as published by Microsoft Advertising, 5 June 2026

How to read the numbers06Methodology and caveats

Data source

Microsoft Advertising’s published Akbank case study, 5 June 2026. Every result on this page is cited from it. APH did not measure these results independently and does not claim them as its own measurement.

Roles

Microsoft’s published case credits Akbank’s agency Optdcom. The Microsoft Advertising account was opened, run and grown by APH as Microsoft Advertising Channel Partner; that part is APH’s own account.

Window

2025. The 16% share of digital sales is stated for the first eight months; the 2.5× comparison is August 2025 against the campaign’s earlier months. Exact start and end dates are not published.

Comparison bases

Applications: an increase, basis as published. Sales: year on year. Cost per click: Audience ads against Akbank’s other campaigns in the same account, not against an industry benchmark. Share: Audience ads’ part of all digital sales.

Seasonality

Card demand moves through the year and the August 2025 peak is one month. No seasonal adjustment or holdout is published, so the lifts should be read as reported, not as incremental.

Results will vary

These are one bank’s published results on Microsoft Audience ads. Results depend on category, market, creative and budget, and we cannot guarantee the same outcome for another advertiser.

The pattern07What’s next

The Microsoft Audience Network is the part of Microsoft Advertising most brands have never bought: native placements on MSN, Outlook and Edge, targeted on the same intent signals as search. For Akbank it proved its value in the account, and the account grew on it. As the Microsoft Advertising Channel Partner behind 80+ brands, this is the sequence we build toward on every financial-services and e-commerce plan: open the account, start with intent, expand to reach, measure the new channel against everything else.

Prepared by Archon Programmatic House · archonph.com/case-akbank-2026.html · Published 18 September 2026 · Results cited from Microsoft Advertising’s published Akbank case study, 5 June 2026