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Track your impact better with new conversion goal options

Conversion tracking helps you measure the impact of your ad campaigns on your business. By monitoring the actions customers take on your website, you can understand which campaigns, keywords or ads are most effective. Conversion tracking is also valuable in optimising your campaigns for the right outcomes. You may be using automated bid strategies, which rely on conversion data and can help you get the maximum number of conversions for your business. Today, we’re announcing two updates that will:
 
  • Help you focus your ad campaigns on the most important conversion goals for your business.
  • Make it easier for you to measure the true value of your ad campaigns on the Microsoft Audience Network.

What’s changing?

We’re releasing two new settings for conversion goals:
 
  1. Include in “Conversions”: This conversion goal setting determines whether or not the resulting conversions are included across the defaulted conversion metrics.
  2. View-through conversions: This conversion goal setting helps you measure the full value of your ads on the Microsoft Audience Network.

Include in “Conversions”

Different conversion goals may have different values for your business. As an example, a conversion goal that tracks purchases may be more important to your business than a conversion goal that tracks newsletter sign-ups.

With the Include in “Conversions” setting, you can decide whether to include the resulting conversions for a given goal in the defaulted conversion metrics across data tables and reports. This will ensure that these conversion metrics reflect only the conversion goals that matter most to you.

Any automated bid strategies that rely on conversion tracking will only use the conversion goals marked with the Include in “Conversions” setting. This will ensure your campaigns are optimised for the conversion goals that are most important to your business. To view all your conversions, including from goals that aren’t set to the Include in “Conversions” option, you can add the All conv. metric (and related derivations) to virtually any grid or reporting type.

All existing and new conversion goals you create will have the Include in “Conversions” setting enabled by default. You can uncheck this setting when you create a new goal or edit an existing one.

View-through conversions

This conversion goal setting is designed to help you measure the true value of your ads on the Microsoft Audience Network. Unlike the Microsoft Search Network, where users are actively looking for the products or services you offer by typing in a keyword, Microsoft Audience Ads are displayed on the Microsoft Audience Network properties based on the audience you are targeting and their intent signals.

These ads influence user decisions and drive purchase considerations, even though users may not click on these ads. Evaluating the performance of campaigns on the Microsoft Audience Network based on click-based conversions may not be optimal and may discount the effectiveness of your ads. To solve this problem, we’re introducing view-through conversions to attribute goal conversions to impressions when users didn't click on the ad.  

How do view-through conversions work?

All Universal Event Tracking (UET)-based conversion goals will have a new setting called View-through conversion window, which will define the length of time after an ad impression in which you want to track impression-based conversions. The last viewed impression within the window gets attributed with the conversion in the View-through conv. metric. To avoid double counting, users who clicked on an ad either on the Microsoft Audience Network or the Microsoft Search Network will be automatically excluded from view-through conversions.

Let’s look at an example of an online retailer who sets up a conversion goal to track purchases on the checkout page with the following windows:
 
  • Conversion window – 5 days.
  • View-through conversion window – 4 days.
 
Below are the journeys of three users who interacted with the ad from this online retailer.

1. The first user saw the ad on Day 1 and converted on the website on Day 3.
Timeline view of conversion, with impression on day 1 and conversion on day 3.

Here’s how this conversion will be attributed:
View-through conversion
View-through conversion
1
0

2. The second user saw the ad on Day 1, clicked on the ad on Day 2 and then finally converted on Day 3.
Timeline view of conversion, with impression on day 1, click on day 2 and conversion on day 3.

Here’s how this conversion will be attributed:
View-through conversion
Conversion
0
1

3. The third user saw the ad and clicked on it on Day 1, saw the ad again on Day 7 and then finally converted on Day 9.
Timeline view of conversion, with click on day 1, impression on day 7 and conversion on day 9.

Because the conversion window is set to 5 days and view-through conversion window is set to 4 days, this conversion will be attributed as follows:
View-through conversion
Conversion
1
0
 

Some additional details to keep in mind

  1. All accounts will be enabled for the account-level View-through conversions setting, which includes the view-through conversions in the All conv. column.
  2. All UET-based conversion goals will have a new setting called the View-through conversion window, which will be set at 1 day by default.
  3. View-through conversions only support impression traffic on the Microsoft Audience Network, which includes audience campaigns as well as search campaigns extended to the Microsoft Audience Network.
  4. Historical data for the view-through conversions metric will be shown as null.

Questions or comments?

Feel free to visit Microsoft Advertising Help for additional resources on conversion tracking. Let us know if you have any feedback or comments on the conversion tracking experience via our Feature suggestions forum or on Twitter.