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Mixed campaigns, keyword planner: Key product updates for November

As the calendar flips to November and the holiday season is upon us, every advertiser is looking for the efficiencies that can help them save time managing campaigns and keywords, as well as getting actionable insights to hone their performance during this critical time. To help you get there, Microsoft Advertising has a whole slew of product updates this month, from a big update on dynamic search ads campaign management to a more powerful Keyword Planner. Check out all the exciting new updates for November below:

This month’s top story: Mixed campaigns

We’re delighted to announce the open beta of mixed campaigns in Microsoft Advertising, which are campaigns that can include both standard ad groups (with text ads, responsive search ads, and keywords) and dynamic ad groups (with dynamic search ads and auto targets). What does this mean for you?

  • Save time managing your campaigns. Now, instead of managing dynamic search ads (DSAs) in separate campaigns with similar settings as your search campaigns, you can manage them together in one campaign. This can drive efficiency in your campaign management and reporting cycles.
  • Import mixed campaigns from Google Ads. Instead of importing campaigns as search-only or DSA-only as before, you’ll now be able to import your mixed campaigns in full.
  • Take your campaign strategy to the next level. Finally, mixed campaigns allow you to structure your campaigns in new ways that can maximise the efficiency of Microsoft Advertising’s automation features and drive greater performance.
 
Product view of the create campaign window, showing both dynamic ad groups and standard ad groups.

Mixed campaigns can now both include dynamic ad groups and standard ad groups.

 

Your existing DSA campaigns will continue to function as-is. If you want to import mixed campaigns from Google Ads, here’s what will happen:

  • If you’re importing mixed campaigns that haven’t been imported before, those campaigns will be fully imported as mixed campaigns containing both your dynamic and standard ad groups.
  • If you’re importing mixed campaigns that have previously been imported as search-only campaigns, dynamic ad groups will now also be imported into these campaigns along with standard ad groups.
  • If you’re importing mixed campaigns that have previously been imported as DSA-only campaigns, unfortunately, standard ad groups cannot yet be added to them. However, these campaigns can be fully imported as new mixed campaigns in a different account, or fully imported in the same account assuming the existing DSA campaign is removed.

A more powerful Keyword Planner

DSA campaigns are a great way to get incremental query coverage on keywords you haven’t yet built out. Of course, another great way to discover new keywords is with Keyword Planner, and we’ve just made it even more powerful and expanded it into new international markets.

First, in getting more effective suggestions from Keyword Planner, we’ve added a section where you can now get keyword ideas from your landing pages, either your entire site or by specifying a certain page.

Product view of the keyword planner results window.

Discover new keywords from landing pages by specifying the entire site or only a certain page.

 

And in terms of international markets, Keyword Planner has now expanded from just six markets and three languages to 34 markets and 12 languages. You can now also target multiple countries under the same language.

Expanded performance reporting

We’ve made some recent announcements about adding prominence metrics to make your performance reporting more reliable, as well as deprecating average position so you’re just focusing on what matters most. We now have two key updates here:

  • Prominence metrics, such as Top impression rate and Absolute top impression rate, are now available everywhere you’ve found average position, so you can get clear insights on each individual entity of your campaign. Note: for new grids/reports where these columns were not previously available, data for these columns are available as of 18 October 2020.
  • Our updated timeline for removing average position from reporting is now 31 March 2021.

A one-stop shop for all your recommendations

Getting quick insights on which you can easily take action is of utmost importance during crunch times like the holidays. That’s why we’re excited to share the new Recommendations page that goes across all your accounts to help you maximise your campaign performance. These AI-powered recommendations help you improve keywords, bids, budgets, ads and extensions, fix critical issues in your accounts, as well as point you towards key automation features in Microsoft Advertising.

Now, if you’re managing multiple accounts, you can get all these recommendations and optimisations in one single place in the Overview page.

Product view of the recommendations results window.

Each recommendation includes the action you should take, how it’s generated, why it’s recommended, and the estimated performance gain to your manager account.

 

We’re constantly improving our recommendation engines to help you better optimise your accounts, and hope that this one-stop shop for multi-account managers can help you accomplish even more this holiday season.

Last but not least: Seasonal In-market Audiences

Hopefully you’re already leveraging In-market Audiences like all Microsoft Advertising users should, as they help you reach people who are ready to buy. We’re excited to share that, just in time for the holidays, we now have seasonal in-market segments with lists of people ready to buy for a particular event, like Black Friday. This is now available across the search network and Microsoft Audience Network in the United States, Canada, Australia and United Kingdom.

Seasonal segments use the same predictive intelligence as existing In-market Audience segments — and are infused with additional signals related to the seasonal event to deliver a relevant user segment of likely converters. The three segments available are:

  • /Seasonal Shopping/Black Friday Shopping
  • /Seasonal Shopping/Black Friday Shopping/In-Store Black Friday Shopping
  • /Seasonal Shopping/Black Friday Shopping/Online Black Friday Shopping

We recommend associating the seasonal In-market Audiences to your existing top performing ad groups with “bid only” targeting and a bid-boost of 20% to begin and adjust as you evaluate performance. For a list of all In-market Audiences available, check out In-market Audiences: Reach people who are ready to buy.

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com.

You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.