Advertisers often ask our Editorial team about the “Approved Limited” status of ads and keywords. While we’ve had a few articles on it (check out Learn About Editorial Statuses and Pending Review: A Peek Behind the Bing Ads Editorial Curtain for a referesher), it continues to be a point of confusion.
An earlier blog, Bing Ads Editorial Status: Approved Limited—What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What You Can Do About It, gives a very good primer on the topic. Learning more requires a look at our guidelines, why we have them and why they differ by market. With this information, you’ll be able to make choices to customize your campaigns to suit your needs and reach your customers quickly and efficiently.
Why Editorial Guidelines?
Editorial guidelines are universal and serve, for us at least, two distinct functions:
- Provide a positive user experience, while adhering to industry laws and standards, and
- Protect the Microsoft brand with Bing as a trustworthy search provider.
A positive experience means giving the user what they expect and want; specifically, relevance and quality. Being a trustworthy search provider means that we don’t advertise anything that’s illegal in a country (online gambling in US), restricted (guns), legal only in very limited circumstances (medical marijuana), or not-illegal-but-designed-to-deceive (such as goods to help you circumvent a drug test or write your high school term paper for you). Our guidelines vary from country to country in response to the different norms and needs of the market. For example: The UK has very strong laws and restrictions on advertising in the financial sector. India doesn’t allow advertisements on tests to determine a baby’s gender.
How It Works
When an advertiser submits ads and keywords, our automated systems scan them for many of these questionable elements. Anything that the system can’t make a determination on goes for assessment to a human editor skilled in the guidelines of the appropriate country. So, an ad for a bank targeting all English-speaking markets might go live immediately in the US, but be selected for a live editor review in the UK.
In these circumstances, the ads or keywords would have an “approved limited” status, indicating that it’s approved in one or more countries but pending review or rejected in one or more. If you find that your international campaigns regularly experience an “approved limited” status, you can solve for this by dividing campaigns by country.
While “Approved limited” shows up as approvals or rejections in both the desktop Bing Ads Editor and the online Bing Ads user interface, you can currently only appeal ads in the online interface. (Note: a future release of the desktop may enable appeals). For information on how appeals in the UI have become faster and more convenient, check out our latest release post, featuring Inline Editorial Appeals.
Thank you for reading,
Gwendolyn
PS! Looking for more Editorial tips? The Editorial Insights page is the place to get the scoop from Editorial experts on the most talked about topics and find answers to frequently asked questions.