Relevance and quality policies
Advertisers and consumers both benefit when they have positive experiences with Microsoft Advertising. To achieve this, please follow the policies about relevance and quality on this page. These requirements focus on four core aspects of your campaign that affect user experience: keyword relevancy, ad copy, landing page and site user experience, and landing page and site content quality.
How does this policy affect your ad delivery?
- Advertisers with more relevant keywords and higher quality ads and landing pages are usually rewarded with more prominent ad positions or a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
- Less relevant keywords and low-quality ads and landing pages might result in less favorable ad positions or a higher CPC.
- In some cases, the ad might not appear at all. Please check the Marketplace Exclusion section below for scenarios in which ads or sites may be completely excluded from the marketplace.
System quality
To ensure a positive user experience, and maintain ad and network quality, we may deactivate or delete accounts that have been inactive for over 15 months or remove non-performing keywords and ads from our platform. We also reserve the right to limit the number of keywords and ads that you upload or retain at any given time. In addition, we reserve the right to restrict ads serving on keywords in the following categories:
- Weapons
- Adult
- Pharmaceuticals
- Gambling
- Trademark (this does not apply to trademarks owned by the advertiser)
Keyword relevancy
Using the right techniques in choosing keywords and building ads not only drives user engagement, but it also helps maintain the ROI of the marketplace for all advertisers.
Keywords should be relevant. This means your site should be a satisfactory destination for users, based on a primary user intent of the keyword(s) you select.
Your keywords should relate directly to either:
- The specific range of products, services, or content on your landing page.
- The general content, purpose, and theme of your site.
Please note: Extremely popular or trending queries may be subject to a higher standard of relevancy and ads must fully align with the primary user intent of the keywords/queries to participate.